[mythtv-users] [ATrpms-users] mythtv - can't start setup or frontend

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:05:09 -0500
    > From: "Michael T. Dean" <mtdean at thirdcontact.com>

    > > You could guess it might be a theme or painter issue, and try
    > >
    > > mythfrontend -O themepainter=qt

    > The -O settings overrides are case-sensitive.  To override the Theme 
    > Painter use:

    > mythfrontend -O ThemePainter=qt

    > > or
    > >
    > > mythfrontend -O themepainter=OpenGL

    > and not only are the settings names case-sensitive, but so are the 
    > settings values:

    > mythfrontend -O ThemePainter=opengl

*boggle*

Is there some technical reason for this, or is it just "nobody's
bothered to provide a patch"?

I can't see why case should be significant (it's not as if opengl and
OpenGL are two different creatures, or we need maximum compactness in
representing single-character options, or whatever), and it seems
especially inconsistent that the name of the option is in StuDlY
cApS but the actual value must be lowercase!  Plus that people are
typically trying this while debugging a problem, which is exactly
when you don't want to raise their cognitive loads with weirdness
like this or silently ignore what they typed (leading to even more
headscratching) because they either didn't know or because they
accidentally missed a shift key somewhere...

[If it's the "no patch but we'll take one", my immediate idea is
obviously to just fix any upstream consumers of these text strings
by having everything mapped to a uniform case (such as lowercased)
and then have all consumers expect lowercase.  If that's too hard,
or too invasive, then we have a table of "correct" capitalizations
indexed by a case-insensitive lookup, and the output of that lookup
goes to the former consumers of these strings.  That's really klugy
but should make proving that you haven't forgotten a fix elsewhere
easy to show.]