I recently upgraded ivtv from about 0.4.x and a 2.6.15 kernel or something really old like that to ivtv 0.10.x with a 2.6.20 kernel and had a few issues that I think should be better documented/pushed to users. Two observations: 1. I had serious issues getting ivtv to work. Everything looked fine, no problems loading module or firmware, no permissions issues. But when trying to run mplayer on /dev/video0 directly or when trying to cat it to a file, I would get no bytes. It turned out that it was because I had udev-87. udev-103 had caused some problems before (with something I can't remember what, but others have mentioned masking >=udev-103 in the forums as well http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-535088-highlight-mythtv+ivtv.html). It looks like udev-104 was available and marked stable so I removed the mask and all was well again with ivtv. So I think at least ivtv-0.10* (perhaps some of the older ones as well) should DEPEND on udev-104? If not, at least a strong ewarn message about udev weirdness. Just checked the forums and bugzilla, lots of reports to back this up. I just noticed the ivtv ebuild does depend on >=udev-103, maybe changing that to >=udev-104 would be better. 2. The second problem I had was that mythtv-0.19 would not work with the new ivtv driver. I needed to upgrade to mythtv-0.20. I finally found this out from this forum post: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-517724-highlight-mythtv+ivtv+api.html but it took me a long, long time to find that out. Not sure how to implement this in the ebuilds. It would be nice to have at least something (another warning in ivtv ebuild?). My first point above about ivtv and udev was easier to solve as there was more forum information about it, but this on took me forever to figure out. I don't want anyone else to go through what I went through. :-) (Thanks a lot beandog for your great work on this ivtv stuff. I found out about the 0.10 update through your blog. The ivtv module so great the way it tells you what kernel you need and which CONFIG options needs to be enabled. Saves a lot of work.)
OK, so... - media-tv/mythtv-0.20_p12172 is stable - sys-fs/udev-104-r12 is stable May I ask why don't you just use it? What's the bug here? - yes, you need media-tv/ivtv-0.10.x for 2.6.20 kernels (it's unstable, as are those kernels). What's exactly the bug here?
Ah, yes good point but whether udev-104 and mythtv-0.20 are stable is irrelevant to me. If I upgrade my mythtv box willy-nilly to the latest packages it will break and whoops, sorry honey, no tv tonight, you'll have to miss your favourite show, while dave fixes the breakage. So I haven't upgraded because I want to keep my wife happy. I've been burned too many times. Not gentoo's fault. I do upgrade some stuff like amarok and firefox, stuff that doesn't affect tv-watching, but I mask some things like >=ivtv-0.5, >udev-87, >=mysql-5, >=gcc-4, >=mythtv-0.20*. If gentoo doesn't want to provide warning or documentation that covers the users that make use of packages.mask that's fine but if it's not expensive to do so, then that makes sense to do. And, I used emerge -va to upgrade ivtv, not emerge -uva. It's totally not what I would do on a desktop system. But if I want to rollback I want to rollback as few packages as possible. Oh, and I did mention in my bug report why I wasn't using the latest stable udev. "udev-103 had caused some problems before (with something I can't remember what, but others have mentioned masking >=udev-103 in the forums as well http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-535088-highlight-mythtv+ivtv.html)." More than one user has put >=udev-0.87* in their packages.mask file so they would miss udev-104. It's also not unreasonable to expect that ivtv would have provided backwards compatibility so that mythtv-0.19 would still work with it...but I guess they didn't. Maybe that should be the warning in the ivtv ebuild... that it "is not backwards compatible and that applications that worked with previous ivtv applications might not work with this one."
