Jamu cron job needs to check for ~/.mythtv/config.xml

Mario, anything you want to know or see before I blow this install away and start over?

Thank you for taking the time to report this crash and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular crash has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug #428473, so is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Please continue to report any other bugs you may find.

Well it looks like this was caused by a missing ~/.mythtv/config.xml in ~mythtv. We should probably make the mythvideo cron job only run if that file exists. My guess is it's missing *because* of the upgrade scenario. We create it normally.

Unmarking the duplicate. It looks like this isn't the exact same as bug 428473, but very similar.

Sorry, I was doing a bunch of things at once and didn't get a chance at the time to see if that existed when the error popped up. Since it popped up immedately after the upgrade reboot, it is possible the file hadn't been created yet... looks like it got created eventually:

Ticket was opened at 11:23pm. Last touch date on ~/.mythtv/config.xml is midnight.

I've committed a fix for this that will show up in daily builds of trunk on sept 21. it's in bzr #116 for mythplugins-trunk-022.

There's a further dimension to this bug, which #116 does not address.

The jamu cron script is included in the mythvideo package, which is used by both frontends and backends. It is entirely feasible to install it on a frontend-only machine, or even on a desktop PC which is not a dedicated frontend

On a desktop PC, it is feasible that you won't run MythTV as a dedicated user, i.e. your normal user (e.g. "directhex") will be running the frontend, not the automatic "mythtv" user (who has, in my case, never been used and has an empty home directory).

There are two questions at this point:

1) Should jamu be executed in my scenario? The Mythtv Wiki suggests it should only be executed on backends. Rather than checking the file exists, it might be better to simply export MYTHCONFDIR in the cron entry, as that directory is treated in jamu as an alternative home for config.xml
2) If not, then what happens if I ever used the mythtv user, even if just to try out? Whether or not jamu is executed depends on whether you've ever run a backend for any reason (debian/mythtv-backend.init line 60), or ever run a frontend as the mythtv user for any reason libs/libmyth/mythcontext.cpp line 1048).

This bug was fixed in the package mythplugins - 0.22.0~trunk22101-0ubuntu1

---------------
mythplugins (0.22.0~trunk22101-0ubuntu1) karmic; urgency=low

  * New upstream checkout (r22101)
  * debian/mythvideo.cron.*:
    - Check that /home/mythtv/.mythtv/config.xml exists before running.
      (LP: #432897)

 -- Mario Limonciello <email address hidden> Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:56:42 -0500