[mythtv] proposed change to mythfilldatabase

[Tom McKearney]

First, pardon me if anything I say in here seems a bit off.  This is
the first time I've posted here.

I have a problem and a proposed solution.

The problem is that mythfilldatabase never completes the download at my house.

The reason for this is because wget doesn't do very well over DirecWay
satellite internet.  Every time I use wget from the command line, I
have to do a loop of "wget -c" calls in order to complete anything of
any size.  Also, since bad weather will blow out my internet
connection, I need something more fault-tolerant.  I also ran across
someone else with DirecWay with the same problem posting to Slashdot.
He said he uses SSH to an external account to download and then
transfers the files to his machine.  Then, he loads them with
mythfilldatabse from the file.

Well, I noticed that in the wget call, mythfilldatabase uses the
--post-file option to pass a SOAP envelope to the server.  Since this
SOAP envelope is based on some database queries and is subject to
change (if the format of the SOAP envelope changes), I didn't want to
write an external script.

So, I figured that I'd change the code.

My proposal is to add a command-line switch --save-post-files (or
something) that just does everything that is done for an automated
download, but creates the post-files in the current directory (instead
of /tmp) and doesn't use wget...

This way, I can fire off my scripts (which will ssh to another machine
for the wget and then scp the files back) and then call
mythfilldatabase with the retrieved files later (all in a cron job).

If anyone has any alternative solutions to this, I'd be glad to hear them.

Thanks for your time,

Tom

P.S. I'm almost done with the original coding (haven't tested yet)