[mythtv-users] [RANT] mythtv-users] Deal with non-HD in SD only frontends?

Kevin Kuphal kkuphal at gmail.com
Tue Dec 22 13:57:21 UTC 2009


On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 4:06 AM, Mike Perkins
<mikep at randomtraveller.org.uk>wrote:

> David Brodbeck wrote:
>
>> On Mon, December 21, 2009 9:34 am, Bill Bogstad wrote:
>>
>>> The database schema can
>>> be found in the wiki, but some of the tables are not documented and
>>> even for those that are many of the fields have no description.
>>>
>>
>> I think the official position is that end users shouldn't be messing
>> directly with the database, anyway, so I doubt documenting it is high on
>> the priority list.
>>
>>  Yeah, but I think the point is, if you want users to become developers,
> they are going to need some documentation to get them started. Some kind of
> overview of the database tables to get an idea of the architecture would
> seem to me to be almost essential.
>
> Or do you expect would-be coders to spend their time grepping every source
> file in the project just to find where each database field is referenced,
> and then to find out where it's read and written? Bearing in mind that even
> that won't necessarily tell you what that field does.
>
> [30 years a coder. Always read all the manuals. Always wrote documentation,
> since I knew that I was probably not going to be the one who maintained what
> I wrote.]
>

Just my 2 cents, I started programming in Myth a while back and have
contributed a few minor patches.  I didn't start needing to get a
comprehensive understanding of the inner workings of every DB setting.  I
didn't even have any Qt experience coming in.  I simply had a problem I
wanted solved.  My previous DVR was a ReplayTV and it had a great "Save this
recording" feature that prevented a recording, when using a "Keep X
recordings" rule, from being expired to make room for the next recording.  I
didn't need massive documentation to make this change, just a little time
with the relevant pieces of code to see how videos were expired and adding a
single UI element to mark them as "saved".  When we're paid to be
developers, we're paid to always write documentation and always read
manuals.  No one is getting paid here and as was said before, this is more
often than not how open source *projects* (not *products*) exist.  Any
deficient documentation exists because someone (and I mean - anyone) hasn't
taken time write it down.

As far as your example above, I don't need to know every place a settings is
read/written to understand what it does.  Most settings are self-explanatory
given their name and the few that are not wouldn't take much looking to
determine how they are used or a simple question on the -dev list after
examining a part of code that uses it to get some clarification.  If someone
took time to do that and continue the work already done on the Wiki to
document the tables, I have no doubt their efforts would be welcomed.

Kevin
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