[mythtv] Why are themes downloaded to /etc/mythtv?

[Raymond Wagner]

On 12/10/2011 13:28, Richard Shaw wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 8:43 AM, Chris Pinkham<cpinkham at bc2va.org>  wrote:
>> * On Sat Dec 10, 2011 at 02:00:04PM +0000, Stuart Morgan wrote:
>>> There was a difference of opinion internally about the proposal. Some
>>> developers wanted to instead implement this via storage groups which is not
>>> something I have the time to work on.
>> We already have a built in 'Themes' Storage Group that points to
>> GetConfDir() + "/themes", we just need to modify libmythui and
>> the theme downloader to honor it.  I made a modification earlier
>> this week (or last) to allow overriding the builtin Storage Groups,
>> so users could put the themes wherever they want by overriding
>> that SG.  I'll take a look at adding this functionality.
> I would think pretty much all of that can be moved to
> /var/cache/mythtv except for mysql.txt, config.xml, and .config/ and a
> MYTHCACHEDIR environment variable would make that very easy to
> accomplish.

I still don't understand why these files have to be moved around.  Just 
overwrite the HOME environment variable to place it in /etc or /home or 
/var or where ever you want, require that users who want to run MythTV 
be in the mythtv group, and give group write permissions to that 
directory.  Nearly all distros just configure their disks as one giant 
partition these days, so it's not out of some concern for lack of free 
space in /etc.  For that matter, back when people did split out 
different folders into different partitions, /var was supposed to be 
intentionally small, containing nothing more than logs and runtime data, 
making storage of things like recordings and theme/image cache there an 
absolutely horrible idea.

When packagers start moving stuff around and doing screwy things with 
the stock configuration, it just makes it that much harder for us trying 
to help their users on the mailing list or IRC channel, since we have no 
idea where anything is located any longer.  It's already bad enough with 
the dozen or so places MythTV already checks for `mysql.txt`.  I'd 
rather not see a bunch of extra settings that do nothing but add 
confusion, and am particularly loathe to see settings triggered by 
environment variables for anything other than debugging.