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

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 21:50:23 +1200, you wrote:

Version 1.2 of my lirc install script is now available:

http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/lirc-ubuntu-18.04-install.sh

The major change is to create a /etc/systemd/system/lircd-dev.service
file that will automatically create a link from the /run/lirc/lircd
socket to /dev/lircd where the MythTV programs like mythfrontend and
mythtv-setup expect the socket to be.  This link used to be created
automatically in 16.04 somehow (I am not sure where it was done from).
But in 18.04 that is not happening, hence the need to do get my script
to set up a way to do it.  If you have already used the script, you
can just cut and paste the new section to a .sh file and run it,
rather than uninstalling lirc and running the whole script again.

The other major thing that I needed to do to get lirc working with
MythTV was to make sure my devinput device name was the same as in my
~/.lircrc file.  In 16.04, the device name was "devinput", but using
the standard setup files for lirc 0.10.0 in 18.04, the name was
"devinput-32".  This name comes from the
/etc/lirc/lircd.conf.d/devinput.lircd.conf file, which has replaced
the old /usr/share/lirc/remotes/devinput/lircd.conf.devinput file.  In
the old file, the two different remote definitions were both named the
same as "devinput".  The only difference between the two definitions
in the old file was the "pre_data" setting line, which is "0x0001" for
a 64 bit device, with a "post_data_bits  32" setting.  For a 32 bit
device, the "pre_data" setting line is "0x8001" and there is no
"post_data_bits" or "post"data" setting.  The same applies in the new
/etc/lirc/lircd.conf.d/devinput.lircd.conf, except that the two
devices have been given different names: "devinput-64" and
"devinput-32".

To fix the mismatched names, you can either change all the ~/.lircrc
file settings (in the included files in ~/.lirc/) - change all the
"devinput" values to "devinput-32", or do what I did, which is to
change the name of the 32-bit device in
/etc/lirc/lircd.conf.d/devinput.lircd.conf from "devinput-32" to
"devinput".

So now I have lirc working in 18.04.1 with MythTV, but there is still
one bug - fairly often, when I use an arrow or number key on the
remote and let it autorepeat, it keeps on autorepeating forever.  As
far as I can tell so far, it seems that lirc may not be shutting of
the direct path for keystrokes from the devinput device to programs,
and they may (on autorepeats) sometimes get keystrokes from lirc and
directly from devinput.  Only the arrow and number keys work directly
- all the rest need lirc working, unless you set up the devinput
config differently.  So the problem only occurs when using keys that
work on the direct path.