Tvheadend

There appears to be an "issue" with where Tvheadend stores its data on Debian which could lead to problems later on down the line.. I noticed this after I did an apt install tvheadend (on the Raspberry Pi).

The debian-multimedia¹ folks have modified the tvheadend.postinst script to setup the hts home directory as /var/lib/hts rather than what we've got [/home/hts], which kind of does make a lot of sense as it is the proper place to store the config data.

I sadly can see some problems..

• Possibly running out of space as some have /var on a smaller partition. Configs can get quite large over time, and the home directory is the default place to store recordings. :o
• People losing the config after an upgrade from the dmo packages to the one provided by apt.tvheadend.org - I've actually been caught by this and had e-mails about missing configs thanks to the differences in directories! Sadly the tvh devs get the flack for this.

So, what do we do?

I propose the following:-

• Make it clear that those who are using dmo packages must get support from dmo, especially for missing configs/space issues.
• Detect the [/var/lib] path in .postinst and use that as the home directory instead. Maybe a warning should be added to inform the user about possible space issues in this case?

¹ Where the Pi foundation have sourced armhf packages of tvheadend 4.2.8, however the modifications appear to be on all builds. I never did ask why the RPIF chose those packages.