Mythtv

[daniel.mons at iinet.net.au]

 On Tue Mar 18 13:07 , Gregory Storer  sent:

>Hello!
>
>I'm using Mythbuntu and have run into a snag that's driving me mad!
>
>I have a back end and that runs very well, hooked straight into the TV
>and then a front end on my Ubuntu desktop that up until yesterday was
>running well too.
>
>Yesterday I ran a heap of updates on the backend server, it all went
>well, but it certainly broke something

The "gutsy-backports" repo has been half-upgraded from MythTV 0.20.2 to 0.21.0.  When I say half-upgraded, I mean half the packages are the new version, and half are the old version.  So much for not doing major upgrades in "stable" releases.  Worse, [X|K|Myth]Ubuntu 8.04 are just around the corner.  Why on earth they didn't wait another 30 days for this I don't know.  

You'll need to do the following:

1) Remove any references to gutsy-backports from your /etc/apt/sources.list

2) Run "dpkg -l | grep myth" to list all installed MythTV packages

3) "apt-get remove" each and every 0.21.0 package from the list above

4) "apt-get update" FIRST, then "apt-get install" each of the packages you removed in 3

5) You may need to roll back to your last good mythconverg database, as the 0.21.0 upgrade breaks things (found in /var/backups/mythconverg.sql.gz).  You can do this via:

gunzip < /var/backups/mythconverg.sql.gz | mysql -u root -p -D mythconverg

Be warned that by default this backup occurs every Sunday.  You may lose several days worth of recording information if that's the case.

I just went through all of this myself.  My own stupid fault for running an "apt-get upgrade" blindly without checking versioning information.  But in my defense, the Ubuntu team are quite good and NOT breaking stable installs with stupid version upgrades in *-backports, and I'd assumed the same thing of the MythBuntu team.  Obviously this was a bad assumption to make on my behalf.  Future installs of MythBuntu in my household will not contain backports repos, nor will they be upgraded so frivolously in the future.  I do hope the MythBuntu team get some feedback on this, and learn not to do these sorts of things in stable releases in the future.

If anyone reading this has a Launchpad account or is a member of the MythBuntu mailing lists, please could you notify the MythBuntu devs of this. 

-Dan