[mythtv] [PATCH] New settings module to tune channel by hand and channel preset hack

[Ben Bucksch]

Ramon asked me to comment on this, so here's my humble opinion.

First, I am glad that Leandro went forward and added that much-needed 
channel setup to MythTV's UI. That's what I needed and why I wrote my 
setup app, but I was too lazy to add it to MythTV myself (eventually, it 
probably would have been faster to add it to MythTV, given how long I 
worked on my app, but that's life :-( ). Thanks, Leandro for doing that 
work.

However, I personally would have used a different layout: First a 
scrollable list of channels, where the user selects one and then another 
dialog where the user can edit a single channel. Esp. given the options 
needed for DVB, the current layout just doesn't give enough room to show 
all the required options, and I find editing only one channel at once 
more logical.

Apart from that, I find it great (generally; judging from the 
screenshot), esp. that live window.

As for presets,

ramon.roca at xcombo.com wrote:

>It only breaks Ben's "channel preset hack", since doesn't take care of the
>channum_real column.
>
That's to be expected. My setup app supports the hack transparently, 
though, and I guess it would be trivial to add it to Leandro's code, if 
something like my patch were checked in.

>-add a "chanfreq" column, that defaults to current channum value, and
>equivalent to Ben's channum_real (I do prefer to call it chanfreq since
>describes better its content).
>
That's a good idea. I'd then choose the wording "freqnum", to avoid the 
confusion with *real* frequencies expressed in Mhz (of which channums 
are another, IMO clumsy form of expression).

Isaac said that my temporary solution is a hack and that he wouldn't 
want to have something like that in his tree - either we change all 
instances of channum to chanid and add another column "preset", i.e. do 
it the clean way, or leave things the way they are. I respect that 
opinion. However, with that new wording, it sounds less of a hack, so I 
don't know, if that changes Isaac's opinion.

I do think, however, that it's still only a temporary solution. I 
described several times already how I think things *should* work 
(*station* names and presets for UI, station id and chanid internally 
and channum for tuning), so I'll just refer back to those posts.

>Populate both columns channid and chanfreq
>during mythfilldatabase first setup to the same value, so that will be
>transparent to the current US users.
>
If you replace "channid" with "channum", then we're close to a temporary 
solution, yes.

I don't think that chanids should be exposed to users. They should 
neither set them nor use them nor should they influence the sorting or 
anything. They are merely a way to internally reference a channel 
unambiguously and quickly.

>-allow, with a new setting at the setup, to choose between current behaviour for US user (default) or use "preset" equivalencies instead of channum.
>
That's not needed (unless I'm missing something).

>-then, with Leandro's manual tuning, the user will be able to change the
>preset numbers, the only thing that must bu changed for doing so is instead of editing chanid column, edit channum, and of course, change the channum to chanfreq.
>
Exactly.