[vdr] Re: Error handling vs. user friendliness.

[Josef Wolf <jw@raven.inka.de>]

On Mon, Jan 03, 2005 at 11:05:29PM +0100, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:

> >>How did that offending timer get in there in the first place?
> >I started a recording, forgot about it, and started to throw away
> >channels.conf entries I am not interested in.
> 
> I doubt that, because VDR won't let you delete a channel which has
> a timer programmed on it - or did you find a way to actually do this?

Oh, I found a very powerful way: emacs ;-)  I _had_ to do it with
emacs because vdr restarted constantly without even logging the reason.
So I started removing entries (generated by the scan utility) from
channels.conf.  For example, this two entries lead to repeated restarts
in random intervals:

   TW1:12662:h:S19.2E:22000:1010:1011:1013:0:13101:0:0:0
   TW1 - 28Feb05:12692:h:S19.2E:22000:166:167:168:0:13013:0:0:0

I have no clue what is wrong with those entries, they look perfectly
OK to me.  And they are _not_ duplicates.  They were generated by the
scan utility.  This is with 1.2.6, BTW.

> >This will let you have duplicates in your favourite list.  But it will
> >not help with the problem I actually had:  Since I could not find an
> >up-to-date channels.conf for Hotbird (S13.0E), I decided to run scan
> >by myself.  The scan utility put some duplicate/broken entries into
> >the channels.conf.
> 
> I'd call that a bug in the scan utility.

Might be.  An other possibility would be that the satelite is actually
sending broken data (or data that VDR don't know how to handle) in the
NIT.

> >Then I had a hard time to find out which entries
> >were actually bad.
> 
> Didn't VDR list the offending line numbers in the log file?

It lists the line numbers when it finds duplicates.  But many "broken"
channels (like the ones above) just cause a restart without logging any
reason.

> Well, then what about just dropping offending lines in channels.conf
> and timers.conf? With log messages, of course...

A warning in the OSD would be nice, too.  There are probably many people
running vdr completely headless (aehm, I mean without monitor/keyboard ;-)
and never care to take a look into logfiles.

-- 
No software patents!
-- Josef Wolf -- jw@raven.inka.de --