Changes to settings do not take effect immediately

[dagwieers]

Describe the bug

Most of the changes to the settings require you to restart the add-on (which means first starting another add-on, then return to VRT NU). This is not very user-friendly (i.e. most people would think restarting the add-on would do the trick).

So it's safe to say that people would consider this a bug (changing settings doesn't have any effect). And especially for logging this is problematic, if you enable debug-logging in Kodi, our add-on wouldn't act on it.

We need to address this before releasing v2.3.0.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Change logging settings
2. Continue using the add-on
3. Or restart the add-on
4. Logging changes do not have any effect

Expected behavior

We need to rethink this. Either reevaluate config-options on use (slower) or reevaluate settings when changes are detected.

Additional context

• Operating system: LibreELEC 9.2 Beta2 (9.1.502)
• Kodi version: 18.4
• Addon version: 2.3.0 (devel branch)
• Using a VPN: no
• Country you are using the addon from: BE

[mediaminister]

This is not fixed yet. When enabling and disabling useresumepoints setting I get wrong values which causes problems with menu refreshing and the Kodi watched status.

I think the pluginsource entrypoint should be restructured according to Kodi's recommendations:

The <reuselanguageinvoker> element is a feature introduced with Kodi 18.0 that changes the way the python invoker works in Kodi - trying to reuse the invoker instances as much as possible. As a result, the addon performance is greatly improved. However, note that for the element to work some changes may be required in your addon. Namely, since the invoker is reused, make sure sys.argv is always passed to your entrypoint and propagated throughout your codebase. Do not store it as a class variable.

I suspect declaring KodiWrapper as a class variable causes problems.

[mediaminister]

@dagwieers I found out that removing the global kodi variable in addon.py fixes this problem.

[dagwieers]

So one solution might be that:

• get_setting() reads from the Window property cache first (and uses ADDON second)
  • (and also updates the Window property cache if it access ADDON settings)
• service.py populates the Window property cache when onSettingsChanged
  • iterating over all known settings

The drawback here is that we add quite some complexity for something that really ought to be something simple.

[dagwieers]

Another more simple solution is to instantiate Addon from addon_entry.py so that it is at least reread once every invocation.

Update: In fact, the routing module also instantiates Addon twice, so this could in fact be the best solution for all Kodi add-ons. We instantiate Addon from addon_entry, pass it to addon.run() which would pass it to Plugin(), and then we could call plugin.addon to access it.

[dagwieers]

Another more simple solution is to instantiate Addon from addon_entry.py so that it is at least reread once every invocation.

I tried this, declare ADDON = Addon() in addon_entry.py, then import it in kodiutils.py. You would expect this to ensure ADDON is always fresh for every invocation. But it isn't for some strange reason.

[dagwieers]

The irony is that the easiest solution is to disable reuselanguageinvoker. I don't see any noticeable performance degradation because we designed the add-on in such a way that it is pretty lean already. Only import the stuff we really need.