[mythtv-users] How do I disable a tuner

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:07:10 -0500
    > From: David Engel <david at istwok.net>

    > On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 04:04:48PM -0400, f-myth-users at media.mit.edu wrote:
    > > [I still think it's a little weird that Myth uses the creation order,
    > > as opposed to something easier for a user to define and/or change, but
    > > that's a different topic.]

    > What would that something be?  If you've got a better idea, let's hear
    > it.  The obvious one is to add another column to cardinput to reflect
    > the concept of input ordering.

That's sort of what I was thinking.  In fact, I think I said as much a
couple of years ago, and I imagine others have probably said so as well.

    > 				    The hard part is then presenting it to
    > the user in such a way that doesn't confuse it with input priority.

I agree.  But we keep hearing that input priority almost never does
what you want anyway, and yet we keep presenting -that-, too...

So instead of making an important priority a total accident of the
order in which the cards were created, find some name for the concept
we're talking about (do we have one already?), name the column that,
and present it to the user using that name.  No matter what name I
come up with, someone will point out that it's not technically
correct, or that I need to read and understand every word of an
enormously long description of what's going on (since that's what Mike
says every time someone tries to use input priorities), so I'll leave
it to Mike or some other expert on that chunk 'o text to come up with
a good name for the underlying concept.

But yes, I think it should be decoupled from the total artifact of the
autoincrement field in the table.  Asking the user to start over if
they get the ordering wrong---or just change their minds---has always
seemed completely crazy to me.  And the whole "it takes me---an expert
who's done this dozens of times---only 30 seconds to do this" attitude
it entirely dismissive of users who -aren't- experts and do it rarely.
That's no way to judge whether the task is easy or hard.  It's a silly
task in the first place if only Myth had a way to do this that wasn't
dependent on the order in which the cards were initially defined.

(For that matter---uh oh, feature creep---we could then define a
priority called NEVER USE and the OP's original question would have
been solved without the whole disconnect-from-sources-no-wait-delete-
it-instead business---just set the don't-use priority and reset it
later.  Users have occasionally asked for this functionality for a
long time to deal with short-term changes to Myth's environment;
this might be a good excuse to make it easier.)