[mythtv-users] About Python & Perl bindings

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Thu Dec 15 19:04:46 UTC 2011


On 12/15/2011 11:25 AM, Kirk Bocek wrote:
> On 12/15/2011 7:59 AM, Daniel Born wrote:
>> I want to get more proficient at using MythTV bindings.
>> For the immediate future, I'd like to use and modify an existing script
>> that uses the Perl bindings. I'll probably migrate to Python eventually
>> but for now, it'll _should_ be quicker to just add a few lines to a Perl
>> script.
>>
>> I've searched for some user documentation on Perl bindings and I've
>> found little more than one example script and a stub page in the MythTV
>> wiki... If anyone has any kind of user/quick reference documentation or
>> examples of scripts they have developed, I'd be interested in seeing them.
> I'll second Daniel's request. I recently posted a perl script here and
> was politely directed by a couple of people towards the perl bindings.
> I've looked at the source and am not finding a whole lot of
> documentation. They're not documented through perldoc.
>
> What's the recommended learning path?

The best path is to either:

a) give up on using the ancient, extremely-low-level, 
requires-updating-scripts-using-them-after-MythTV-updates (even just 
revision updates) Perl bindings and use the Python bindings

or

b) rewrite the Perl bindings to be more like the Python bindings and 
then document them

There's no real documentation for the Perl bindings, now, and no good 
reason to create any because they don't sufficiently abstract out the 
details of the internal MythTV implementation of things to make them a 
useful API.  This isn't a dig toward the Perl bindings--they were just 
never finished (they were basically just some code that existed in 
nuvexport that was pulled out with the intent to make it more generic 
and abstract, but no one ever got around to doing that, and at this 
point it's probably easiest to redo them from scratch based on the 
design of the Python bindings or even based on the place the Python 
bindings are moving toward (with more use of the services API)).

Mike


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