[mythtv-users] Mything thomething

[Jay Ashworth]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Simon Hobson" <linux at thehobsons.co.uk>
> Jay Ashworth wrote:
> >But since there's no reasonable way to back out an upgrade, what
> >can you do, when you "upgrade it", and it goes in the toilet?
> 
> Personally I can roll back my system completely to it's state on any
> day for the last few months. It's something called "a backup" and is
> not the responsibility of an application developer. Myth is not alone
> in this, I don't think any of my systems have the facility built in -
> Mac OS X doesn't*, Debian doesn't**, and I don't think any of the
> applications I have with their own updaters have it.

Simon, I've been a professional systems administrator for 30 years now.

I know what a backup is.

The *point*, which Robert got, and you didn't, is that *you can't restore
a backup of an old install without losing recordings made after the
upgrade happened*, because their metadata won't be in the database.

Worse: they're sitting right there on the disk, taunting you like you
should never do with Happy Fun Ball... but you *still* don't have usable
metadata for them.

*Rollback* -- a completely different thing from "restore" -- often 
requires specific assistance from application designers; that's not
even surprising.

Except, apparently, to RPM programmers and the Android Market.

> I think the only system I've used that DID have that facility was the
> SCO OpenServer I used to manage. There you could roll back
> updates/patches - but only in reverse order to how they were applied.
> Ie, if you applied A, B, and C, then to rollback B you would have to
> rollback C, then B, then reapply C.

One of the stunningly rare things that SCO actually did *well*, yes.

> In general, the people that are building a system are NOT the right
> people to be writing the documentation. Firstly, the skills are
> usually different, secondly they "know where they are going" and so
> it's easy to miss things out that are obvious to them but may be
> completely obscure to the target audience. I see the same thing with
> road signage - all too often, the people designing direction signs
> are familiar with the area and so cannot see when they've left a gap !

Nerdview sucks, yes.  :-)  I've done doco on several projects (including
this one), and you're right that it's a different set of skills.

> But having said all the above, I'm still on 0.21. Yes it took me some
> time to get it working - for a while there were some issues that just
> prevented it compiling. Since I have had it working, I would never go
> back. I am going to be looking at upgrading shortly, but I'll be
> upgrading my hardware at the same time and so have the luxury of
> parallel running till I get the new system up and running.
> Just to make life difficult for myself, I'll also be looking at going
> HD since there are reports of the PCTV NanoStick T2 290e working.

Yup: .21 ran like a top.  Upgrading off it killed my SAF pretty bad...

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
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