[mythtv-users] Mass channel deletes

[Michael T. Dean]

Bruce Markey wrote:

> Michael T. Dean wrote:
>
>> Since TMS currently adds "new" channels to all lineups (instead of 
>> allowing you to choose to lock in a lineup), and since I have DISH 
>> network (which is adding all the local stations around the country), 
>> I get new channels at least once a week (sometimes several channels 
>> per day).
>
> On one of their surveys, TMS asked if there should be an option
> to not automatically add channels. Appearently nothing has come
> of that. I'm sure in your situation I'd rather go in and check new
> channels periodically or when I fould out that my provider added
> a channel I want to receive.

Yeah.  I remember voting for that option.  :)  Glad to hear that it's 
not just some setting they've added since then that I haven't yet found.

>> To keep the 13 channels to which I've subscribed, I've been deleting 
>> the channel and program information after updating my lineup at 
>> zap2it.  However, I've never deleted any info from programrating, 
>> programgenres, credits, or people.  It looks like it's been getting 
>> deleted after "expiring," but I wanted to verify that my (lazy) 
>> approach should not cause any problems.
>
> Mine was the Adrian Monk approach. Most of these have dates and
> will expire. "people" doesn't but it's a finite set and the same
> names come up again. If the program table is emptied so that you
> can't match a bogus show then the auxiliary info doesn't matter.
>
> AFAIK, this isn't a problem right now, however, there have been
> times in the past that mfdb may have leaked data by not cleaning
> up properly and I used to dump out all of these tables every so
> often just to be sure that I wasn't building up cruft. One thing
> you could do is "select count(*) from tablename;" to find what the
> normal sizes are and if any table is growing over time.

Good to know, but you're making me feel like I'm slacking on my own 
Adrian Monk-ishness.  I spend way too much time cleaning my computer 
systems, and now that you've mentioned another thing to clean, I'm sure 
I'll be much better about my channel deletes.  I'll also have to check 
out MythWeb's delete channel code to see how much it cleans up for 
me--that might be an easier way to get it all clean.

Mike