[mythtv-users] Setting up a backend on Ub11.10

[Karl Dietz]

> I've found several How-Tos regarding MythTV, and this seems like a good
> solution. However, I'm not entirely satisfied with the number of
> dependencies that are installed by apt-get, and would like to
> cherry-pick only the truly required packages for my needs.

You are doing it wrong.
Just add one of the giveaway USB sticks to your backend to compensate.

> "The following NEW packages will be installed
>   libarchive-zip-perl libclass-inspector-perl libclass-load-perl
>   libclass-methodmaker-perl libclass-singleton-perl libconvert-binhex-perl
>   libdate-manip-perl libdatetime-format-strptime-perl
> libdatetime-locale-perl
>   libdatetime-perl libdatetime-timezone-perl libdigest-hmac-perl
>   libemail-address-perl libemail-find-perl libemail-valid-perl
>   libexporter-lite-perl libfcgi-perl libfile-slurp-perl
> libhtml-fromtext-perl
>   libhtml-tableextract-perl libhttp-cache-transparent-perl
>   libhttp-server-simple-perl libio-stringy-perl liblingua-preferred-perl
>   liblist-moreutils-perl liblog-tracemessages-perl libmath-round-perl
>   libmime-tools-perl libnet-dns-perl libnet-domain-tld-perl libnet-ip-perl
>   libossp-uuid-perl libossp-uuid16 libparams-validate-perl
>   libparse-recdescent-perl libregexp-common-perl libsoap-lite-perl
>   libtask-weaken-perl libterm-progressbar-perl libterm-readkey-perl
>   libtext-bidi-perl libtie-ixhash-perl libtk-tablematrix-perl
>   libunicode-string-perl libwww-mechanize-perl libxml-dom-perl
>   libxml-libxml-perl libxml-libxslt-perl libxml-namespacesupport-perl
>   libxml-parser-perl libxml-perl libxml-regexp-perl libxml-sax-expat-perl
>   libxml-sax-perl libxml-twig-perl libxml-writer-perl libxml-xpath-perl
>   libxmltv-perl libyaml-syck-perl perl-tk xmltv xmltv-gui xmltv-util
> 0 upgraded, 63 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
> Need to get 13.2 MB of archives.
> After this operation, 78.7 MB of additional disk space will be used."
>
> It seems like a heck of a lot to install just so that I can grab TV
> schedules from the web.

If you find the amount of dependencies "just to grab schedules from
half of the world" obscene I'm happy to review your patches to
consolidate dependencies. A lot of lint has collected in the corners in
the past 10 years. Yet nobody has stepped forward to clean up until now.

Please start by rewriting the danish grabber to avoid Parse::RecDescent.
Then rewrite the icelandic grabber from using XSLT to something we
already depend on.
Next would be moving all grabber over to the DateTime library so we can
remove the dependency on Date::Manip. This will likely solve some time
related bugs, too.

If that works out well you can start by rewriting the base framework on
top of libxml instead of XML::Twig and XML::Writer.


The easier alternative is obviously to just install from sources or go
for the on-air guide data and not use xmltv at all.

Looking forward to your patches,
Karl