Shaw's digital transition

[gandalf]

We all know that Canadian OTA is going digital next week and that it will not affect cable customers. I was confident in that statement until I noticed a transition that Shaw is doing to move non-basic-cable channels from analog to digital progressively over the next year or so. In Victoria the change date is today [update: now delayed until September 20th] - so I got to thinking about how it would affect my SageTV system. Shaw claim that the only people affected will be those who do not have digital boxes - because effectively a channel like Discovery (which is #27 here) will suddenly stop broadcasting in analog and will start in digital (on the cable system). What their statement means is that if you watch TV via a digital box you will see no difference - because the box sorts out the incoming format. Shaw PVRs will also have no problem - nor will SageTV users who use the digital boxes with an IR blaster.
However my own setup uses an older analog WinTV tuner for all the low channels and a pair of R5000 modified digital boxes for all the digital stuff. So I need to know whether a channels is analog (which I must record on the WinTV tuner because the R5000 cannot resolve analog sources - it is just a digital pass-through) or digital (in which case the WinTV tuner will not make any sense of it so I need to move the channel to the lineup for the R5000 tuners).
Until this recent change, there was no issue. Channels on the lineup for "Full Cable Service" were all analog - so I used that lineup for the WinTV tuner. Channels for the "Digital service" included everything - so I used that lineup for the R5000s and just disabled all the ones duplicated on the other lineup.
This year, however, all that changed when Shaw moved a couple of US channels over to digital - without making a big deal of it. Result, I had several episodes of shows recorded by the WinTV tuner that were blank. Took a while to figure that one out - so I manually disabled the channel in one lineup and enabled it in the other - no sweat.
Today I figure I am going to have to do the same trick with several other channels - but it got me thinking and trawling through the documentation. Since I could not find what I need, I thought an explanatory post and a few questions might help - and might perhaps helpo a few others understand a problem they may not yet know that they have.
So much for the background explanation - the questions.
The lineups appear to be provided by Zap2It as selected when the source is installed. The lineups seem to be copied into the Sage Properties file. Presumably they must match some master list from Zap2It in order for updates to cross-reference correctly so I am guessing that I cannot create myself split listings to put all the digital channels onto one source and all the analog channels onto the other - or can I? Does anyone have a better understanding of how this bit of the Sage Properties file works?
Perhaps a better solution might be to switch over to XML TV listings - does anyone have any good experience of doing that in Canada?