[mythtv] FIX "do not autoexpire" Flag made persistent

[Bruce Markey]

Chris Pinkham wrote:
...
> Auto-expire means Auto-Expire and Max Episodes means Max Episodes and hacking
> in a few special cases will only make things more confusing for the user and
> make the code harder to follow.

I whole-heartedly agree.


>   If there is some form of UnDeletable field,
> it's easy to understand and would/should be globally applied.  I think this
> would cover all the situations that people have presented and be clearer.

...but I disagree with adding a field for the very reason mentioned
in the previously sentence =).

You could look at how things appear to work now and think about
how to add more complexity to get closer to the behavior that users
would want and expect. Or, you could step back and look for a better,
cleaner solution.

To me, there are really only two states: the system is allowed to
delete this recording for whatever reason deemed necessary by the
options I specified, or do not allow the system, under any
circumstances, to remove a recording that I've decided to keep.

Because of this, I believe there should only be one flag. It doesn't
matter if it's called "Auto Expire", "Allow Delete", or "Keep",
"Preserve", "Archive", whatever (however, I don't like the double
negative nature of "Undeletable". It is always better to say what
something will do rather than what it won't not do).

Of course it would be technically possible to have options to say
that a recording could be allowed to be deleted if there are too
many episodes but not if the disk is full or delete if the disk
is full but not if there are too many episodes but what would be
the point of that? I'm sure someone could contrive an example of
the exception that proves the rule but I have to believe that using
multiple flags would be more prone to user error and confusion than
doing anything useful. I don't want to consider multiple scenarios
and multiple options when I decided to hang onto something. Either
I've decided to keep it and I don't want any surprises or I'll
allow the system to remove it whenever necessary. No other states
matter to me.


> This also gives people protection from things like kids accidentally deleting
> that movie you've been waiting 2 months to see that just recorded last week
> but you haven't had a chance to watch yet. :)
> 
> 
>>here the Diff for the "don't record if this would exceed the max episode" part :
> 
> 
> Actually, I think that was the diff for the "don't delete recordings that
> aren't set to auto-expire when you're looking to delete recordings over the
> max episodes limit" part.  :)

Of course it's fun to say this and it is a perfectly defensible
argument. However, what I want is the best DVR system possible
and while I can agree with your logic, Marcel's approach is really
more like what I'd intuitively expect. 

Say I've set maxepisodes to 3 for The Simpsons (The Simpsons seems
to be a common target for the maxepisodes feature ;-). One day
they show "Krusty Gets Busted", perhaps the finest half-hour of
television of the 1990's. I decided to keep it because I will want
to watch it again. In doing so, I did not change my mind and now
believe that I only want to keep 2 other recently recorded episodes.
If I saved another Simpsons, then I'm down to only one other showing.
I could go and increase the maxepisodes each time I chose to preserve
an episode then decrease it if I later discard it. However, that seems
like a pointless exercise. If I decide to preserve a show, it should
no longer count as one of the limited disposable episodes. If the
current wording doesn't fit this logic then the wording should be
changed.


I understand your point that you want to keep max episodes and auto
expire separate as they are different features for different reasons
and I can respect that. However, looking down the other end of the
telescope, as a user sitting in front of my screen and looking at
my recorded list, there are shows that I don't want the system to
delete for any reason. For most shows I wouldn't mind if the system
had to delete them and don't care what that reason might be even if
it was another feature that doesn't yet exist. Either I absolutely
want to keep it or I don't. Any other state would only add confusion.

--  bjm