Background
Every great once in a while Myth-Frontend will crash (actually its not so much of a crash but an awkward state where all of the UI is hung). I isolated the issue to starting the frontend when another frontend instance was already open (I have a keyboard shortcut that starts the app and if someone hits it twice, two instances of the frontend will be started). Needless to say, it is a hassle when this happens as the only solution I know of is to kill the myth frontend processes.
I began the search for how to disable the “auto-restart on crash” for myth-frontend. To my surprise, this was a difficult task as the book of knowledge (Google) had very little info on how to disable it but a lot of into on people asking how to enable it.
I decided to dig into it myself. It appears that the standard myth-frontend launcher invokes mythfrontend --service. This service then launches the real mythfrontend mythfrontend.real --logfile /var/log/mythtv/mythfrontend.log and monitors for a crash. If the mythfrontend.real crashes the mythfrontend --service starts another mythfrontend.real. Not exactly an elegant application runtime life-cycle but we’ll assume there is a good reason for how this was implemented.
Details
Needless to say, the above process for starting the frontend was causing the issue. My solution is quite simple, I changed the launchers/keyboard shortcut to simply start mythfrontend.real --logfile /var/log/mythtv/mythfrontend.log rather than mythfrontend --service.
Notes
The above solution has worked for me for several years without any issues.
