[vdr] Re: split up channels.conf

[Klaus Schmidinger <Klaus.Schmidinger@cadsoft.de>]

Olivier JACQUES wrote:
> 
> Hi.
> 
> I think that the issue here is that we can always imagine a new feature that
> needs another field in the channels.conf. Splitting the channels.conf has
> the advantage of keeping backward compatibility (with the few "scanners" or
> "channels.conf generators") + allow addition of features (which, I hope,
> will grow fast with the plugins).
> As an example, I was thinking of associating a channel logo to each of the
> channel and being able to choose (zap) from logos and no channel names.
> Well, I guess you can imagine whatever you want.
> IMHO, the 'split' is a good idea.

Whatever way you "split" the data, you'll end up duplicating information.
The channels.conf lines contain all information necessary to tune to a given
channel, and their line numbers give a natural way of having channel numbers
going 1, 2, 3,... With an additional "favourite" field we could have up to 32
different favourite channel lists without the necessity of duplicating
information or cross referencing tons of files.

If a channel scanner thinks it has to redefine channels, it can do so if
it knows how to identify a channel. It can use the (yet to be implemented)
"source", transponder and SID for this, without having to "split" channels.conf.
Of course, if that process would rearrange the sequence of the channels, it
would also have to take care of timers.conf - but that's something VDR does,
anyway. So if we implement some additional functions that allow a plugin to
rearrange channels and have timers.conf be automatically updated, this should
be no problem. 

I could even imagine an additional field in channels.conf that contains an
arbitrary string, which VDR itself doesn't care about. So if you have additional
information you want to store in a channel definition, you could do that.

If we "split up" channels.conf I believe things would become unnecessarily
complicated. Imagine somebody who wants to define a channel with only one
of several audio PIDs. If we only use [source|transponder|SID] to identify
a specific channel, that wouldn't work since there could be several channels
that match this key, only distinguished by the APID. So I guess we would have to
add the APIDs to the key as well - but what's next?

I still firmly believe that it's best to keep things simple, and that means
having channels.conf as it is, possibly extended by a "favourite" flag field
and (if this is something people would like to have) and arbitrary string
field for various purposes.

As for the above example of "associating a channel logo": this could be done
by the plugin by identifying the channel through the [source|transponder|SID]
without any impact on VDR, especially without "splitting" channels.conf.

Klaus
-- 
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Klaus Schmidinger                       Phone: +49-8635-6989-10
CadSoft Computer GmbH                   Fax:   +49-8635-6989-40
Hofmark 2                               Email:   kls@cadsoft.de
D-84568 Pleiskirchen, Germany           URL:     www.cadsoft.de
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