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

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 17 Aug 2018 16:10:20 +1200, you wrote:

>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.

I believe I have now worked out how to fix the lirc install in 18.04.1
so that lirc-setup works.  I am just working on a script to do it all
automatically, as it is a bit complex.