[mythtv] Idea?

[Shawn Pearce]

Tony Clark <tclark@telia.com> wrote:
> If we need a watchdog then we had all better go back to win95, there it would 
> be useful.  Seriously though this type of application shouldn't need one.  I 
> use watchdogs in embedded stuff but there are quite different animals.  They 
> shouldn't need them either but some of the embedded guys I work with don't 
> realise that :)

When your really serious about your embedded device, you don't want it
to not be operational.  Its almost impossible these days to test every
single test case of every input/output possiblity and all states that
the device can get into.  Consequently, its a nice safeguard to throw
in the watchdog.

Granted, it should't crash.  But its nice when it does (because it will)
to have automatic recovery.

How about having the watchdog write a log message, and have Myth present
the log on launch if the last launch resulted in a crash.  Similiar
to Windows knowing you did a good shutdown vs. a bad shutdown and
forcing fdisk to run on startup.  :)  If the last run crashed, Myth
shows a message.  If it didn't, no message.

This might be able to turn into a nice way to send feedback to the
developer.  If you have gdb installed and built Myth with debugging
symbols on you can get a stack trace from the core, email it out,
and delete the core - all from the comfort of the couch and the remote
control.  Just throw a button "Send Crash Info to Developers" in that
message box to kick off a shell script doing this work.

-- 
Shawn.