[mythtvnz] Lirc is a disaster in 18.04 - do not upgrade yet

[Stephen Worthington]

I upgraded my laptop MythTV partition from 16.04 to 18.04.1 last
night.  I knew I was going to have to do some work on the lirc setup,
as it has changed a lot.  But it is a complete disaster.

The first problem I discovered was that my custom key table files for
my remotes (stored with the standard files from the package under
/usr/share/lirc) were deleted by the upgrade process.  That is not
supposed to happen - new or changed files are supposed to be left
alone or the user asked for what changes are to be done.  Fortunately,
I have copies of them on other machines and on my web server.

The new Python lirc-setup program does not run at all - it just
crashes asking for a module it can not find.  All its files seem to be
scattered about in various places and not on the Python path system so
it can not find them.  It clearly has never been tested at all!  It is
possible that manually setting up the configuration files might work
(I have not tried that yet), but at the moment, I would recommend that
no-one who uses lirc should do the upgrade.

I have managed to get lirc-setup to the point where it is only looking
for its C support library (_client module), by putting links to things
from one directory to another.  I have also tried compiling and
installing lirc from source code, but that suffered from the same
problems.  I will be trying some more things tonight I hope and will
report progress.

I discovered one web site that said the only way they could get lirc
working on 18.04 was to get an older version from 16.04 and install
that instead.

I have a full backup of the laptop MythTV partition, so I can always
just revert to 16.04 if I need to - I will not actually need MythTV on
it until the summer holidays, so I have plenty of time to fix things
before then.