On Wed, 2005-12-28 at 01:58 +0200, Otto J. Makela wrote:
> I'd like to see very simple things in this installation documentation
> like what the mechanism for starting the software is, what plugins are
> included, and what kind of tweaks may be required before using it.
Well, like Udo said, packaged software tends to follow the
distribution's conventions for file locations, service startup etc, and
IMO it would be redundant to document that in every package unless it
considerably deviates from those. In the case of the vdr packages at
livna.org, the installation locations try to follow FHS and Fedora's
conventions which I believe will cause least surprises for people
accustomed to the distro's way of doing things.
> For example, in vdr-1.3.37-0.lvn.1.4 the start mechanism is a
> standard /etc/init.d script, but it wasn't that long ago when the
> recommendation was to run vdr directly from inittab.
I'm not aware of such a recommendation, and quite frankly, I would find
it odd if a package tried to plug itself into inittab (which would
require modifying the inittab file, possibly risking smoothness of
automated distro upgrades).
> Another example where documentation would make things easier,
> it took me a while (call me stupid) to figure out yum-2.4.1-1.fc4:
> the way /etc/cron.daily/yum.cron looks at /var/lock/subsys/yum,
> which is controlled by /etc/init.d/yum {start|stop} -- elegant,
> but a bit obscure unless you know what's happening.
I agree (even though I wouldn't describe that as elegant), but that's
somewhat off topic here.
> The vdr package drops files to /etc/sysconfig, /etc/vdr, /srv,
> /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/sbin, /usr/share, /var/cache, /var/lib, plus
> of course /etc/rc.d and /var/run. It'd be nice to have it immediately
> pointed out to you that /etc/vdr is where the configs are, /srv is
> where the recordings go and /var/cache is where the epg is stored, as
> the "documentation" in /usr/share/doc of course says nothing about
> these things.
Try "man vdr". The manual page has been patched to point to the
package's installation locations. (Location of epg.data is not too
obvious though as it's overridden in /etc/sysconfig/vdr by default, I'll
look into improving that.) If something's not and/or you have further
improvement ideas -> http://bugzilla.livna.org (so it won't be
forgotten).
Some useful rpm commands in case you're not aware of them:
rpm -ql vdr # list all files owned by the vdr package
rpm -qc vdr # list all config files of the vdr package
rpm -qd vdr # list all documentation files of the vdr package
> I'm not sure how standard these locations are at this
> point of vdr development?
Surely they're not the "standard" of VDR, but more so wrt. the FHS
(www.pathname.com/fhs/) and Red Hat derivative distros. That's an
intentional choice.
> that's exactly why I'm using the ready-built packages
> (thanks to whoever maintains them!)
rpm -q --changelog vdr | less # thanks ;)
> > I don't see anything in VDR's documentation or sources that would
> > refer to any firmware paths, so the thing saying the above is
> > probably the DVB driver you're using. I just sent a patch to the DVB
> > mailing list that might improve the related messages and docs a bit.
>
> You are correct, it's the dvb driver:
[...]
My patch was applied, hopefully it will make things more obvious in the
future.
