[mythtv] More on the mythwish bulk search program

[Brad Templeton]

I have updated the experimental mythwish program.  As before docs and
source can be found at:

        www.templetons.com/brad/myth/mythwish.html

Updates include duplicate detection, and ablity to delete entries in
bulk as well.

I have put up a source list of about 270 movies for people to cull from.


Observations:

    a) At least on a fast machine, you myth can sort-of handle having
    100 search requests in the database.   However, when you change
    any recording schedule, it appears to re-search them all, which
    can take about 20 to 30 seconds even on a fast machine.  During
    this period, it doesn't talk to front ends, so the front end may
    report a diagnostic that the backend has gone away.

    That's not a great result, and a large search list on a slow machine
    might be untenable.

    The best long term solution would be a special table for large
    wishlists, which is re-searched only after a mythfilldatabase, and
    ideally only on the new data.


    b) Some searches you just don't want to do.  Looking for movies
    like "In America" or "Rebecca" will find you lots of TV shows.
    As of course will things like Mash or even "Ghost in the Shell"
    or "Ghostbusters."     The only fix for this is a compound search
    query which allows searches to specify either exact title match
    (instead of like %string%) or to specify other fields, like a year,
    or category==movie and so on.

    c) In a move probably not related to this, because it happened before
    I added any searches, I now am experiencing mythbackend freezes
    from time to time when I use mythweb, notably the current recordings
    list.   The backend reports:

        NULL in string in list in WriteStringList

    the First time I do the mythweb fetch, but it works (after about a
    20 second delay).  However, the next time I do it, the backend dies
    in an endless fast loop of
        2005-01-12 02:20:29 waiting for a thread..

    The only search I see that reports this error associates it with
    Mysql 4.1.  I was running 4.0 and switched over to a version 3,
    still no luck.



Due to the slowness of the search, I am not releasing the program
beyond the dev list at present, however I will continue to run it.