[mythtv-users] Disk Space Way Wrong

[Don Lewis]

On 20 Apr, Mark Lord wrote:
> On 12-04-20 12:51 PM, Raymond Wagner wrote:
>> On 4/20/2012 12:40, Mark Lord wrote:
>>>>>> It's not doing anything fancy, it just runs statfs on the path
>>>>>>you give it. There's the bug.  It should open the path, and the
>>>>>>use fstatfs(fd, ..).
>>>>> Doing it that way would make symlinks transparent to it, as they
>>>>>should be. So less a bug, and more a feature request (with a patch)
>>>>>for a strange and uncommon configuration.
>>> All eight mythtv setups that I know about have the same style of
>>> configuration.
>> 
>> So they're all strange.  Why not just point MythTV directly at the
>> directory?  MythTV only ever records to the root of the directory you
>> give it, so it's not like symlinking in multiple folders is going to
>> get you more storage space.  You still have to define each in
>> mythtv-setup.  It's not going to allow you to bypass some file
>> permissions restrictions.  Even if you frequently move the mount 
>> location of those storage drives, symlinks are only slightly more
>> convenient to change than the values in mythtv-setup.
>> 
>> I'm just not understanding what benefit doing it that way could
>> provide.
> 
> It lets me move the storage directories around without having to
> fuss with mythtv-setup and other places that might have a hardcoded
> path.

If you follow the advice here
<http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Storage_Groups> about not storing recordings
directly under mount points, you can still use symlinks to point to the
actual mount points and the disk space will be reported correctly.

> Symlinks are an incredibly useful feature, you should discover them
> someday.

I'm not a fan of using symlinks for this for multiple, though minor,
reasons.

	There's always the danger of creating a dangling link.  It shows
	up in the output of ls, but you have to try to do something that
	actually follows the link to verify that it actually points
	somewhere valid.
	
	The paths in the output of df will differ from mythweb backend
	status, which means that I have to expend some additional mental
	cycles to translate between the two.

	As a csh user, I find it annoying that when I cd to a path that
	contains a link, then when I try to return using .., I end up
	somewhere else than were I want.  Bash hides the fact that a
        symbolic link has been followed, but I'm not sure that's always
        a feature.

In all the years that I've been running MythTV, I've never felt the need
to move my storage directories around.  I've frequently had to use
mythtv-setup edit my storage groups to add directories as I've added
additional drives.  This is not something that symbolic links would make
any easier.  As a matter of fact that it would be harder because
creating the additional links would just be an extra step.