Plan for tvtime 1.0

  Doug and I just had a phone call about tvtime and what we want to do
for 1.0.  The overall theme will be:

   a. Complete all major features enough that tvtime is at least usable,
      even if we can't implement them.
   b. Rip out anything that is broken, unmaintained, or useless.

  This will make tvtime more stable and complete since it's clear that
none of us have enough time or interest to keep doing active development
on it.  I don't mind continuing to support tvtime, but let's at least
get the feature set under control.

  The plan for 1.0 is to release on August 1st.  Here are the features
we are targeting:

  1. Make tvtime easier to configure for PAL users.  I wanted to
     integrate tvtime-scanner into tvtime itself.  I think it will be
     faster and easier to do some sort of quick GUI to setup the station
     list instead using tvtime-scanner.

  2. Provide some sort of application to debug capture card problems.
     Nobody can figure out how to debug problems with their capture card
     besides google, and google is often wrong.  tvtime's errors are
     unintuitive, since tvtime has no ability to detect failures in
     driver configuration.

     I propose we do some sort of shell script or GUI to help debug
     capture card problems.  This should be really easy with the tvtime
     codebase, and will take the pressure off of tvtime's lack of some
     useful debugging features.

  3. We should probably provide some sort of stronger xmltv integration
     to know what shows are on besides the current one.  This is
     something Doug wants to work on, I think we might be able to throw
     in something simple into tvtime, but beyond that we should refer
     users to a real XMLTV browser.

  4. XMLTV setup is painful for many PAL users (and some north american
     users).  Maybe as part of the solution to point 1 we can support
     this as well.

  Features I plan to rip out:

  1. MPEG2 support.  It is incomplete and too much work to finish.
  2. The rvr recorder.  It is incomplete and too much work to finish.
  3. SDL support.  It is not useful.
  4. DirectFB support.  I cannot maintain this and I believe it is
     broken.
  5. The matrox driver.  I no longer have the desire to maintain this,
     and I don't think anyone used it anyway.  Furthermore, it's
     featureless and not very useful.

  Thoughts?

  -Billy



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