[mythtv-users] Disk Space Way Wrong

[Ronald Frazier]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 2:48 PM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:
>> He was nothing but respectful in this thread, helped identify a problem,
>> and even provided code to deal with it.
>
>
> At first, yes, however this whole thread started due to his mention of an
> "old bug" that none of us had even heard of.

Saying something is an old bug is disrespectful? Sorry, but that's
just a statement of fact. It is an old bug. I too noticed it quite a
while ago. You know why I never reported it? It just wasn't that
important. I almost certainly was trying to do something at the time,
came across that at the time, said "that aint right", looked at it for
a few minutes, and then went about what I was originally trying to do.
I'll admit I often notice little bugs in software, but I don't halt
everything I'm working on to go report them on the spot. By the time
I'm done with what I'm really trying to do, the bug is far from my
mind.


>> Symlinks are a "normal" (not "strange") thing on Linux,
>> and are often overlooked by folks more familiar with
>> only Microsoft systems (which lack them).
>
>
> This is where the discussion took a turn downhill.  Mark "threw the first
> punch", as it were.   Now he may have meant this as a joke, but from
> experience having been corrected by Mark in the past, many times where he
> was correct, sometimes where he was not, Mark is never wrong.  This felt
> like an insult, as if I was a Windows weenie, not experienced with using
> Linux.  Admittedly, my OS of choice is FreeBSD, rather than some blend of
> GNU/Linux, but that's besides the point as symlinks are a POSIX standard not
> specific to Linux, and even Windows has support for them.

That's a pretty low bar for "the first punch". It is a fact that
windows people don't think about symlinks much. Windows does support
them...sort of. But their implementation is a lot less robust than in
linux, and for what they can do people just don't tend to use them
very often. But that doesn't say anything negative about a windows
user unfamiliar with them (in fact, if anything, you were the one who
just used the term "windows weenie"). It's just not something typical
among windows users. However, for a linux user, I do agree with Mark
that it's a bit odd for someone to consider use of symlinks to be an
odd configuration.


> If there were a rational argument for allowing symlinks as storage
> directories, I would gladly apply the patch.  However, I just don't see one,
> and the only argument for it was that it is how Mark configures his systems.

Wow. You need a rational argument? See, I can clearly see the
explanation that, you know, this isn't really a major issue, it
doesn't affect that many people, and I'm not going to take the time to
write a fix for it. That's perfectly valid. There are a million things
to do, and everyone has limited time, so we need to pick our battles.
But see, first mark is told he needs to go to the effort of making the
patch and creating the ticket, but then you turn around and suggest
you wouldn't apply it anyway unless someone can provide a good reason.
Can you see why some people don't want to go to the effort of
submitting bugs and patches?


> The attack on Myth was where he
> claimed it had bugs, knew what they were, but let that knowledge sit for
> years without telling anyone so it could be fixed.  No doubt about it,
> MythTV is full of bugs, but we can't do anything about it if we don't know
> where they are.  Especially if they are induced by some sufficiently strange
> configuration that no one else has experienced them.

Don't want to repeat myself here...I think this was already addresses
by my first paragraph above.


> So going back to the original argument, is this a bug, or is it merely an
> unsupported configuration?  Now one could argue that even if it isn't
> supported now, it should be, the the better question is, is there any reason
> to try to record to a symlinked directory?  The argument for says that it
> allows you to conveniently and quickly reorganize your filesystem structure.
>  The argument against is that MythTV's storage directories allow you to
> reorganize your filesystem just as well.  Just run mythtv-setup, spend a few
> seconds typing in a new path, and you're done.

I do 99% of my work on my mythbox from my windows system through SSH.
This is very convenient, and if I want to move a symlink, I can do it
in 5 seconds. If I want to change a storage group, my mythbox is in
the basement, tucked away in a corner where it is unobtrusive for the
family. Unfortunately, a side effect of that is that I don't have room
to leave a monitor hooked up. So I have to go downstairs, drag a
monitor over to it and hook it up, do what I need, and then put
everything away after I'm sure I've done. Now, when I need to do
something in mythtv-setup, that's fine. But when I can do something in
5 seconds instead of several minutes, I'm gonna spend the 5 seconds.
If this were some huge ugly hack, that would be one thing, but this is
pretty standard stuff.

As for the rest of what you said about why symlinks aren't a valid
configuration and you shouldn't even want to look at anything in the
folder and so on....I'm going to hugely disagree, but at this point I
don't even care enough to argue. It's not worth my time. But let me
summarize it like this. You complain because he never submitted a bug
report. If he had submitted a bug, you make it clear that it's not a
bug but a feature request. We all know how those get rejected if they
don't contain patches. However, if he had submitted the feature
request with patch, you would still shoot it down because you think
myth should purposely ignore symlinks because it's not a valid
configuration. So tell me, what COULD mark have done that would have
pleased you? Bug report? Rejected. Feature request? Rejected. Feature
request with patch? Rejected. So are you just upset that he didn't go
through the motions of making a futile request?


-- 
Ron Frazier