Confusion about releases

Tony Houghton

I noticed in the bug tracker that 4.2 is "unsupported", but what else are we supposed to use? The v4.3 tag is even older. I tried tvheadend-git from AUR, which was at version 4.3-2433_gf1c460feb at the time, creating a new configuration from scratch, and I couldn't get authentication to work consistently (403 errors despite all permissions being enabled in the user I had created).

Then I stumbled across this WIP changelog. It appears to have an alternative version numbering scheme in which the minor version decreases instead of increasing. How does that work? The newest "release" there, 12.34.1, links to debs and rpms with version 4.3-2351 which are about a year old. Are they more reliable than git head?

davep

Tvheadend is currently on a 'rolling release' model. The 'version number' contains 4.3 for consistency with older versions, 2433 is the commit number since the 4.3 tag and f1c460feb is the Git commit ID.

The "WIP Changelog" is Work In Progress, an experiment in automatically producing change information from the GitHub commits. It isn't being kept up to date.

From your mention of AUR I presume you're running Arch. This isn't one of the project's build targets so you would need to build from source. Can you supply more details about your system and the problems you're having?

Tony Houghton

Yes, it's Arch Linux. I noticed that 'tvheadend-git' is configured to use the username 'tvheadend', whereas 4.2.8 uses 'hts'. I'm not sure, but I think 4.2.8 was using _hts/.hts instead of /etc/tvheadend and /var/lib/tvheaded. I recreated a config from scratch.

The Arch package includes a systemd service that starts tvheadend with the -C option, so I was able to log in and create a new user. But it took several attempts of wiping the config and starting again before I was able to create a user that I could log in with afterwards instead of getting 403 errors. Then I forgot to enable the UK Freeview EIT grabbers before starting a scan, so all the HD EPG events had blank titles and summaries (because they use the same custom Huffman encoding scheme as Freesat). I couldn't find any way to get the EPG to fill in correctly so I wiped /etc/tvheadend and /var/lib/tvheadend and started again. This time I couldn't fix the authentication problem so I gave up and went back to 4.2.8.

davep

This laptop runs Arch so I tried building the Tvheadend-git package from AUR. The package built OK after tweaking the PKGBUILD file to avoid having to also build the dvbcsa package. After installing the package and starting the service I was able to connect to the UI and run through the setup wizard to create admin and normal users.

After exiting the wizard I was prompted to login again with my new user credentials, and got a 403 error. Eventually I realised that during the setup wizard I'd entered the IP subnet of the local network, but I'd entered localhost:9981 in the browser! Using the laptop's network address I could login as either the admin or normal user no problem.

Tony Houghton

davep Do you mean you were running the browser and tvheadend on the same laptop and your allowed addresses didn't include 127.*? I think I tried both leaving it blank and entering 0.0.0.0/0. I was trying with the browser and tvheadend on separate machines on the LAN. I have mDNS enabled so I use a ".local" address in the browser address bar.

Flole

davep If you have a proper workflow to build an arch linux package it would be great if you could make a PR for it so it gets built and added to the official repository.

Tony Houghton

There are already two tvheadend packages in AUR, "tvheadend" for 4.2.8 and "tvheadend-git" for the latest version. Without official upstream releases it's unlikely to make it into the official repositories, but I'm OK with that. I know how much of a chore doing releases is, and getting it from AUR is easy enough. I don't think my problems were caused by the packaging. I gave it another go yesterday. This time the wizard made it past the first page on the second attempt and I used it to create an admin and a normal user, and they both seem to work now.