[mythtv-users] Question on mythfilldatabase logs and "mythfilldatabase ran, but did not insert any new data into the Guide" message

[Michael T. Dean]

On 10/16/2019 08:39 PM, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Oct 2019 19:04:49 -0400, you wrote:
>
>> I'm using the tv_grab_zz_sdjson XMLTV grabber for one OTA source on
>> SD. Every once in a while the status has that message that says
>> "mythfilldatabase ran, but did not insert any new data into the Guide
>> for 1 of 1 sources. This can indicate a potential grabber failure". My
>> guess is that this is just a timing issue where SD just may have not
>> yet changed, as it's always clear that the data fetch is working.
...
> I believe that "did not insert any new data" message happens when the
> number of new programmes is low, not actually zero, or if the time of
> the most future recording des not change.

It's 100% whether the time of the farthest-future program does not 
change--the number of programs isn't considered and there's no attempt 
to find out if there are "new programs" inserted.  We've had users whose 
data providers put in a bogus, many-years-in-advance episode 
accidentally and, even after they quit sending it, that bad data that 
got put in the database caused the warning to become permanent until the 
user manually deleted the bad program.

The message is often pretty much useless, but, if nothing else, maybe 
should say something about seeing the message continuously for many days 
/and/ seeing a drop in the amount of future data could indicate a 
problem (in the above situation, the problem is the bad far-future 
program, which is not much of a problem, but seeing listings go from 14 
days to 13 to 12 to 11 to 10... is most likely a real sign of a 
problem--though it could be a temporary one with the provider as opposed 
to a problem with the grabber/grabbing process...).  It would be better 
if MythTV "knew" about the approximate number of days your listings 
providers data goes out and warned when we started to drop below that 
number, or, better yet, if it looked for the number of days with similar 
numbers of programs (to discount the one far-future program) over a 
rolling multiple-day period and warned only if that number of days 
dropped a couple or a few days in a row and/or we started to approach a 
day with a "statistically low" number of programs.  That said, making 
those changes would be a lot of coding for very little benefit.

Personally, my preference would be to remove the message completely and 
let the diminishing future listings speak for themselves rather than 
warn/scare people needlessly. :)  Not everyone shares my opinion, so the 
message remains.

Mike