[mythtv-users] UK Freesat retune

[Simon Hobson]

Michael Watson wrote:

>>>Any manual tweaking has the potential to waste people's time when it
>>>causes unforeseen problems. For example, imagine the scene in two
>>>years time when I do an upgrade which fails, I ask on the list for
>>>help, everyone tries to troubleshoot, and several days later after
>>>many emails back and forth it turns out that it failed because there
>>>was an unexpected value in the DB that was only there because of the
>>>manual DB change which by then even I have forgotten about.
>Upgrade routine to failout describing what "value" caused the failure.

Nice idea, but it's not necessarily an invalid value that's caused 
it. Ie, just checking that the value in there is in a specific list 
of values isn't enough.

There are plenty of settings which can interact, and there are a lot 
of settings. Given the number of ways in which people can use MythTV, 
and the places they live (hence sources available), the number of 
permutations becomes absolutely massive - hence why there aren't 
simple presets that will completely configure a new system, there are 
just too many permutations for that to be possible.

So it's not beyond the realms of possibility that changing a setting 
may cause a problematic interaction with another settings, while both 
settings are themselves valid values. It might be that the module 
that normally sets the value you are modding will not allow the 
combination, or the setting is not manually accessible, but there's a 
difference between setting it in the first place and checking all 
combinations later.
So great care needs to be taken when modifying anything in the 
database manually.


Having said that, I use a script to modify my database, though it 
only sets a limited number of fields (Channel Number, XMLTV ID, 
Visible) in the channels table - ie a table that can easily be 
cleared out (Delete All Channels) and repopulated.

-- 
Simon Hobson

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