[mythtv-users] The "right" way for non-dev users to test 0.22 RC1?

[Bob Cunningham]

I've been struggling with v4l and mythtv issues for nearly 2 years, and last spring I finally decided to give up and wait for 0.22.  I've never had a working v4l and mythtv system.  Then the MythTV 0.22 RC1 announcement arrived.

Last weekend, I found all my v4l issues had been resolved, and I'm now able to view unencrypted SD and HD cable content via tvtime and xine.  Time to try MythTV 0.22 RC1!

My goal is to stay off the dev list, and test 0.22 RC1 as if it were truly a "Release Candidate", and not as an SVN drop that escaped from the lab before it was ready.

My next step was to prepare for the 0.22 RC1 install.  Yesterday, I scrubbed all the old MythTV files and content from my Fedora 11 system.  I did this to ensure any prior mistakes I made did not contaminate the new installation.

My next step was to find instructions for the 0.22 RC1 install.  I first checked the wiki (http://www.mythtv.org/), but I failed to find the 0.22 RC1 installation docs there: If you want "regular" and "newbie" users to help with RC1 testing, the RC1 docs must be located where Google can find them!

My googling did reveal that the Fedora RPMs were in rpmfusion-updates-testing.  I immediately went looking for mythtv-suite, but found that package was not in the repository!  More googling took me to the MythTV Trac page, where I learned that the "mythtv" package had been repurposed to replace mythtv-suite.

Come on, something that fundamental should not have required Google to find.  I would have expected a change to the FIRST STEP of installation to be somewhere on the wiki in large, bold print.

With no other directions in-hand, I decided to blindly install the 0.22 RC1 RPMs from rpmfusion-updates-testing using "yum install mythtv".  Fortunately, THAT finally provided me with a copy of the 0.22 RC1 docs.

Again, those docs, or pointers to them, really need to be on the MythTV wiki.  But I may have said that already.

I'm at the end of Section 3, and am running "yum-builddeps mythtv" now.  I've never used this command before, and was surprised that "yum install mythtv" didn't catch all the dependencies.

Before I get too much further, is there anything else I should know, especially anything that is not in the 0.22 RC1 docs?

Again, my goal is to stay off the dev list.  If 0.22 RC1 cannot be installed and run without dev support, should I give up and wait for RC2?

Does anyone NOT recommend the path I'm on?


-BobC