MythTV frontend only

[andrewwalker27]

Am I correct in thinking that you have to install MythTV as a whole with Gentoo? I basically only want the frontend but there doesn't seem any way to just install that part although it is possible on most other distros. This doesn't seem in keeping with Gentoo's usual approach of cutting down on excess, has any one looked at splitting the package into separate frontend and backend packages? Ideally the backend could be run on a headless box as long as you could set it up initially, can anyone else highlight any problems with this approach? The other approach could be frontend and backend use flags, again, has anyone attempted this before?

[Hu]

At one time, the Gentoo MythTV ebuild had flags for building only the frontend and building only the backend. If I recall correctly, they came with strong warnings that upstream did not consider that a supported configuration. Although it requires more space, it is quite possible to install the entire MythTV on two systems and treat one of them as backend only and the other as frontend only.

[depontius]

I run MythTV, with several systems used as frontend-only and one as frontend-backend. I used to use the "frontendonly" USE flag, but it's no longer available. As of now, there's just some wasted compile time and disk space.

The only caveat I'd throw in is that when setting up a backend system, you have to run the GUI-oriented "mythtv-setup" command. Presumably this command could be run on a headless machine, with the DISPLAY exported, but I've never tried this.
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