Doug Goldstein

First a little background on how we package MythTV in Gentoo. The -fixes branch is where Gentoo’s 0.20.1_p##### series of ebuilds come from. Basically mythtv-0.20.1_p13783 means MythTV 0.20.1 + all fixes and patches from 0.20.1 to svn revision 13783 from the -fixes branch. You will however notices that a lot more issues get fixed in trunk, which is Gentoo’s 0.21_pre##### series of ebuilds. A lot of these issues do get backported to -fixes after some time, generally with users begging for the fixes to be backported since most developers use the trunk versions.

Well the issue arose a few weeks ago when the MythTV upstream guys started to revise their default themes and add some additional icons to the -fixes branch. This causes a problem because of how we currently package MythTV, essentially I just svn up and do a svn diff -r 0.20.1:HEAD >mythtv.patch and that file ends up in SRC_URI and is downloaded and automatically applied on top of the tarball. This way users only have to download a few kilobytes of a bzipped patch and keep the base tarball on their system. However, with the binary changes, there is no easy way to create a diff or a changeset, so that leaves us with two options. Create a whole new tarball every single time, or download from svn directly.  The tarball every single time involves a little bit of work for me and a lot of downloading for the end user. If I update MythTV every week or every other week, that means about 40mb of downloads everytime. On the other hand, relying on svn means that we’re extending the build time depends but saving on bandwidth. (Yes, there is a third option which is create another tarball of all the binary changes plus the patchset, which is a headache and I’ve done it before for mytharchive and I have no interest in doing that).

Since MythTV upstream constantly tells users “are you at the latest svn? if not upgrade to the latest!”, it seems like they are confident in the svn infrastructure and recommend that to be used so I’ve gone the route of svn. This way the entire tree will only be checked out on everyone’s systems once and only the minor changes will be downloaded each time. This should conserve bandwidth and also ease maintenance  requirements which will provide for more frequent updates which seems to be what everyone wants. It’s unfortunate that MythTV does not have better release engineering so that we could avoid this, but unfortunately we’re stuck in between a rock and a hard place on this one.

In closing, it is correct that MythTV beginning with 0.20.1_p14146 depends on subversion.

Filed under: Linux, MythTV
5 Comments