Add Enable/Disable Auto Shutdown to System Menu

[Britney Fransen]

The attached patch adds the ability to enable or disable auto shutdown from the System Menu. Items will not show if auto shutdown is disabled.

[gigem]

I asked some other developers about this change and we're unclear on its usefulness. Can you please explain the use case for this and why you think it's desirable?

[Britney Fransen]

The intent is to reproduce MythWelcome?'s lock/unlock shutdown menu item in MythFrontend. MythWelcome? isn't needed with the Standby ability of MythFrontend and there is not currently a way in the GUI to disable or enable backend shutdown temporarily. If a user has configured their backend to shutdown every night but wants it to stay on tonight they would have to open a term and run mythshutdown --lock and then mythshutdown --unlock when they want it to resume auto shutdown. Like MythWelcome? this requires the Pre-shutdown Check Command to check mythshutdown's lock status (MythShutdownLock? db setting) to allow shutdown.

[Peter Bennett]

Personally, I do this with tests in the pre-shutdown check script for various conditions, including any user logged in apart from my tv-watching user. That way, for example, if I am logged in to the master backend via ssh it will not shut down. Other conditions are also tested, like for users accessing mythweb.

However - if you want it to be done from the frontend menu - that can also be achieved without any code changes. You can customize your menu theme with additional options and use the "EXEC someprogram" action to set a file that is checked in pre-shutdown or to call the mythshutdown --lock, whichever way you want to do it. see ​https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Menu_theme_development_guide.

[Bill Meek]

Hi Peter, my use case is similar to yours. I do, however depend on the ability of MythShutdownLock to be a counter, such that if I ssh in more than once, the backend won't shutdown 'til the counter is back to zero. Seems like the code in mythshutdown --lock/--unlock is proper. [in the odd case you're not already thinking alone these lines] No idea if others do the same.

​https://code.mythtv.org/cgit/mythtv/tree/mythtv/programs/mythshutdown/main.cpp#n102

[Peter Bennett]

The developers do not feel this patch is generally useful. Thank you for your efforts and please do not let this put you off submitting further contributions.