Re: [Xmltv-devel] Initial channels.dat TAB causes breakage in 0.5.51 tv_grab_uk_rt

[Jan C. <jan...@co...>]

Nick Morrott wrote:
> Fortuitously, I had already put through several changes to the grabber
> to enable it to continue when it encountered malformed data, rather
> than exiting prematurely, so anyone running the lateset stable release
> when the RT 'broke' their data files would have been unaware of the
> problems. The changes were avaialble in the 0.5.52 release - the
> current XMLTV release version is 0.5.55.

Nick,

Great to see that this bug has been fixed before it hit the majority of 
users. Thanks.

>>  (Sorry, upgrading to the current version of xmltv is "hard" for me).
> 
> I do not use Ubuntu and I do not know what their policy is for bumping
> versions of stable packages. If it is the case that 0.5.51 is the most
> recent XMLTV version available, it must be worth seeing if a more
> recent release of XMLTV could be made available (even 0.5.52, which
> was released over 10 months ago, would fix the issue), as this old bug
> would surely affect all XMLTV/tv_grab_uk_rt Ubuntu users who do not
> manually install XMLTV from source?

I have enabled the hardy-backports repository, which does not offer the 
more recent versions either:

root@via:~# apt-file search /usr/bin/tv_grab_uk_rt
xmltv-util: /usr/bin/tv_grab_uk_rt
root@via:~# apt-cache policy xmltv-util
xmltv-util:
   Installed: 0.5.51-2ubuntu2
   Candidate: 0.5.51-2ubuntu2
   Version table:
  *** 0.5.51-2ubuntu2 0
         500 http://ubuntu.mirrors.skynet.be hardy/universe Packages
         100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

A bit more detail on my problem: I recently upgraded this system from 
Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10), in which the xmltv-util package had the following 
version: 0.5.49-1ubuntu1. This version did not fail. I however had to 
upgrade to Hardy because Gutsy is no longer supported. Hardy is the 
long-term supported version. (I could go to Jaunty which is a newer LTS 
version; I may yet do that. Jaunty includes xmltv 0.5.53).

Another point is that under Gutsy I found myself having to cherry-pick 
grabbers (other than uk_rt) from more recent versions of xmltv, because 
the older versions were no longer compatible with the websites they 
grabbed from. However, this introduced dependencies on newer versions of 
Perl (libraries) as well, which were extremely messy to resolve. I'd 
prefer not having to go through that again. I'd probably do this in a 
chrooted environment if I did have to do it again.

Thanks, Jan