[mythtv-users] Merge two versions of 'oldrecorded' ?

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 11:55 AM, Mark Perkins <perkins1724 at hotmail.com> wrote:
.....
> Though to be honest - in my opinion - I think the "if you touch the DB outside of MythTV itself, you are on you own, now, and for all the future" goes way too far. If someone is well intentioned in what they were trying to do and were open and honest in telling us what they had done then I would still like to think that the collective power of 'the list' could help, or try and help. Maybe it's just me but I would like to try and help, at least to the limit of my capability. And I guess that is the power of a list - those that want to help will, and those that don't want to help won't.

And I have seen posts from people having/reporting issues and
asking for help, and then, after many exchanges back and
forth trying to understand how something could get into that
condition, admits many posts later that s/he used a DB
editor to make just a little change (in some core table)
based on some suggestion months or years ago, or thinking
it was a good thing to do.  Which, depending on your
persuasion, was either excellent customer support, or
a complete waste of time (which, unfortunately, was done
by someone whose value to MythTV as a core dev meant you
possibly did not get that feature you have been asking for :-).

If one is honest with "I broke it, now is anyone willing to help"
post, I think that is entirely reasonable.  But humans have
this bad habit of not providing sufficient information for a
meaningful and useful and time efficient resolution regarding
these things.  Sometimes because they think it could not
matter, and sometimes because they forgot what they did,
and (the worst) sometimes they are afraid of admitting the
truth because they know it was likely their fault and they
would not find sympathy (or help) for their misadventure.

In my ideal world, perhaps when the DB goes embedded,
any access outside of MythTV itself would mark the DB as
"tainted", so that such activity is known for all time in
the future (the equivalent of the "tamper evident seal").