[mythtv-users] mythfilldatabase autorun config file location error

[Michael T. Dean]

On 10/18/06 02:29, Axel Thimm wrote:

>On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 12:57:49PM -0400, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>
>>If Axel were to change the init scripts to specify a 
>>HOME, then those users who had gotten configuration information into 
>>directories of the root filesystem would no longer be using that 
>>information (and would, therefore, have to be taught to move their 
>>configuration information).  So, changing the scripts and not changing 
>>the scripts both have their benefits.
>>    
>>
>The scripts should be changed. But the new packages should
>auto-migrate the config values to ~mythtv/, so that the user doesn't
>notice the transition other than he would miss the legacy location of
>the files, should he be looking for them.
>
>Maybe something to fix for 0.21 packages or packages from SVN, since
>the migration scripts could be breaking something.
>  
>
Wow.  I'm impressed with your RPM-foo.  I didn't think that would be 
possible.

The hard part will be figuring out how to "merge" the wrong directories' 
contents with the information that may/may not exist in the right 
location (depending on what programs have been run as what user).  In 
reality, the /.qt (or /root/.qt) directory is probably unnecessary and 
could just be deleted--it's likely to only contain QT-autogenerated stuff.

So, all that's left is the /.mythtv (or /root/.mythtv) directory, with 
things like lircrc, channels (channel icon directory), 
<videosourcename>.xmltv, MythVideo posters, MythGallery thumbnail cache, 
MythNews cache, MythWeather image cache, mythstream configuration, 
{osd,theme}cache, and (others?).  You could probably just delete caches, 
but that will still leave a few tricky ones.

>>But, as you were saying, running mythfilldatabase as root is not a good 
>>idea.  So, by extension, figuring out how to run mythbackend as non-root 
>>is a good idea.  :)
>>    
>>
>There are a couple of reasons that make mythbackend run as non-root an
>issue on some or all dists.
>
...

>So the hurdle to run as non-root is quite high, and in some cases the
>user would not notice that some issues (like bad latency) would come
>from running as non-root.
>
Right.  It won't always be possible, and the packagers for particular 
distros likely know the issues much better than users would.  (And I can 
guarantee that packagers for distros definitely know the issues better 
than I.)  In reality--especially on an "appliance" like Myth--it's not 
that big a deal, but is a nice goal to keep as the distro changes in the 
future.

Based on the number of times this has come up, I doubt that FC is the 
only distro with this issue, but this time, the people involved happened 
to be using FC.  However, if FC aligns all 
mythfrontend/mythbackend/mythfilldatabase execution with 
HOME=/home/mythtv, it should fix issues for a large percentage of users, 
and we'll only have issues when users configure mythbackend/XMLTV as 
root (with HOME=/root) instead of as mythtv (HOME=/home/mythtv) during 
initial setup.

Hmmm.  Wondering about the ugly, yet functional, symlink /root/.mythtv 
-> /home/mythtv/.mythtv as a preventative measure...

Mike