xmltv: what's the best way to keep it up-to-date?
I'm the maintainer for the package 'xmltv', a set of utilities that download
TV listings data from various websites. Due to the nature of such programs,
they have a habit of breaking every now and then when the source websites
change. Evidently this is a problem in a stable release.
My first instinct is to think that this makes xmltv a candidate for being
maintained in volatile (I asked about this first on debian-volatile[1], but
I'm yet to receive any feedback from that).
I guess another option would be to include an xmltv package in squeeze that
works for most people, and provide updates for those who need it via
backports and point-releases. Since the package contains a number of grabber
utilities, generally one or two per country, breakage in one particular
source website won't affect all users; most users will only be using the
grabber for their country.
I welcome your feedback about which option (or other suggestions) to go for.
If releasing xmltv in squeeze/main is the preferred option, I would
appreciate it if you would consider the latest version (0.5.58) for squeeze;
the important changes are:
+ Updating the (previously experimental) grabber for India, which is now
fully live
+ Removing the grabber for Argentina, as it is currently non-functional.
This is expected to be fixed in the next release, so will have to be
updated by whatever means deemed to be appropriate.
+ Improve the speed of the find_grabbers utility; the previous version
was too slow, triggering a timeout during the setup of MythTV, one of
the main users of xmltv.
+ Updates to the grabbers for Estonia, France, Hungary & Romania,
Iceland, Italy, Israel, North America, the Netherlands, Reunion
Island, Spain, Sweden and the UK to cope with source website changes.
The diff is here:
http://www.crustynet.org.uk/~chrisb/xmltv-0.5.57-3_0.5.58-1.diff
diffstat (excluding the ChangeLog diffs) is:
25 files changed, 2405 insertions(+), 2046 deletions(-)
There were other changes to the source between 0.5.57 and 0.5.58, which I've
not included:
+ An obsolete URL for the upstream website was replaced with the
current one; these changes are just in the PODs and the meta-data
generated by the grabbers. You can see examples of this change as part
of the grabbers still in the diff, but I've removed the diffs where
this was the only change in the file.
+ A number of patches which I submitted upstream were incorporated; I've
excluded these changes (and the removal of the patch files) from the diff.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-volatile/2010/09/msg00000.html
--
Chris Butler <chrisb@debian.org>
GnuPG Key ID: 4096R/49E3ACD3
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