[mythtv-users] Mything thomething

Jay Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Sat May 28 02:44:17 UTC 2011


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robert McNamara" <robert.mcnamara at gmail.com>

> On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 7:31 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > be. But since there's no reasonable way to back out an upgrade, what
> > can you do, when you "upgrade it", and it goes in the toilet?
> 
> It mostly depends on your definition of reasonable, I guess. MythTV
> backs up the database automatically any time the schema changes, and
> version upgrades are no exception. So you'd go into your "Default"
> storage group, see the .sql.gz file dated/timestamped when you did the
> update, and restore that. More specifically, you'd:
> 
> 1) Stop the mythbackend service
> 2) install the packages for the old version of MythTV
> 3) restore the database backup which was automatically created by
> following the steps at
> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Database_Backup_and_Restore
> 4) Restart the backend
> 5) There is no step 5

Alas, there *is* a step 5: mourn all the TV shows you lost on your *live
production device* that were recorded after the upgrade, and for which you
now have media files, but no way to recover the DB entries that match them.

It rarely blows up immediately, Robert.  It's generally a couple weeks
before you decide that it's more trouble than it's worth.

And as it happens, the last version I had before the one presently installed
(which does have storage groups)... didn't.  

I realize that a) large advances in available functionality are 
difficult to make simple to back out, and b) it was free.  But it's 
not *really* free; it costs money to build and maintain the box, 
power it, and opportunity cost to not run something else.

And not everyone has the money, time, and other resources to build a
test box to see if it's *going* to be livable before cutting over to
production, and knowing a) and b) will *not* stop us from being
frustrated.  As big and popular as Myth is these days, I think everyone
involved is lucky that the noise level stays as low as it does.

It's (generally) pretty good code, for the size of the build.  But it's
going to break occasionally, and it's going to piss users off occasionally.

We'll get over it.  Unless someone shoots back.

(Your reply here did not actually qualify as "shooting back", just so
I'm clear.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274


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