[mythtv-users] MythicalLibrarian, symlinks and Myth: Will this work or will Myth lose its mind?
Raymond Wagner
raymond at wagnerrp.com
Wed Feb 1 21:12:44 UTC 2012
On 2/1/2012 15:32, Matt Emmott wrote:
> If you'd like to see how MythicalLibrarian does its thing, here's the
> output from my log as it figured out a recording of In Living Color -
> Posted to pastebin at http://pastebin.com/HqPq265Q
I know the basic operation. I spent a decent amount of time with the
author about a year and a half back working out some bad things he was
doing to the database, and trying to encourage him to learn a more
capable and more sensible language. Of course I failed, because it was
already written in BASH, "which everyone knows is designed for textual
data". All that built in capability for textual data must be why the
script is a mess of calls out to curl, sed, grep, and awk to fake XML
processing.
This script really kicked off my hatred of bash. There's nothing
inherently wrong with bash, per se. If you're doing some limited
variable manipulation, and just intend to string together or run
external utilities, it's great. That, plus the fact that it's light
weight, and can be statically linked, is why it's used for init scripts
so often. On the other hand, I see far too many instances on this
mailing list where people write absurdly long bash scripts, doing all
sorts of database manipulation, because bash is what they know and
they're afraid to leave their comfort zone. That's not to say more
advanced interpreted languages are immune to that, as there are plenty
of other examples of things that would do well to be implemented
directly into the code base, but are left in perl/python because
"compiled languages are hard!"
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