On Jan 24, 2010, at 5:45 PM, Alexey Loukianov wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
24.01.2010 17:06, Charles Lepple wrote:
What versions of the FreeBSD are considered to be "current" from
the NUT
perspective?
I have pretty much given up on versions older than 8.0, and I don't
have the time to track FreeBSD-CURRENT.
Does it mean that earlier versions of FreeBSD are considered
unsupported by NUT
development team and the will be no support offered in case there
are any issues
with the NUT compilation or behavior on legacy systems?
I should clarify that - I personally have given up on the *USB stack*
in earlier versions of FreeBSD. The behavior of serial ports across
different Unix variants is pretty standard, so I don't expect any
surprises there.
We are generally open to helping users get NUT running on other
versions of FreeBSD, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect NUT
developers to have a wide variety of versions of the OS waiting in the
wings. (Yes, we could use virtualization, but when it comes to USB, we
have two problems: too many versions to test, and a bunch of
virtualization bugs to track down.)
Latest release (2.4.1) was done about a year ago (Feb 2009) and
accordingly to
the SVN log there were a lot of the useful changes (that are surely
demanded by
the NUT users worldwide) since then. It is widely common for the linux
developers to use half-a-year release cycle (RedHat, Canonical, KDE,
Gnome) and
I think that it might be good to try to stick in with the same
policy for the
NUT releases. It might give a better integration into the major
distributions
like Fedora or Ubuntu and will offer the end-users with a better
service
(unfortunately it is common for the linux end-user nowdays not to be
familiar
with the SVN and with the software installation from the source code).
Not sure what the other developers think about this, but as a user, I
would prefer that a package like NUT didn't change as much as the
desktop distributions do. The less that we change, the less that needs
to be re-tested, and two years after deploying Buildbot, all we are
automating is the build cycle.
"Because they're doing it" is not a reason in and of itself.
The question concerning the offer of the some support level to the
older linux
and FreeBDS distributions seems to be one of the most important to
me as the NUT
is at its nature (primarily) a sysadmins tool that is most likely to
be used in
the server room or in the datacenter and it is not uncommon for the
such
installations to still use legacy hardware and software.
By that argument, we probably shouldn't have USB support (since it is
not as well-established and tested as serial).
As I had already
mentioned in one of the mailings there are still a lot of
installation of the
even such an old beast as the RHEL3 out there in the corporate
world. RHEL4 will
be supported by RedHat for about two additional years starting from
now. If I
had the correct understanding of the FreeBSD Project release
schedule at the
current moment there are two branches that are supported: 7.x and
8.x. Security
updates will be also offered for the 6.x branch until the 30th of
November,
2010. This means that it would be good for the NUT to compile and
work correctly
not only on the 8.x branch but also at least on the 7.x branch of
FreeBSD.
Does it make sense or am I missing something?
These two examples are cases where the supporting organization has
taken the NUT software and folded it into their own distribution.
RedHat tends to stick with older versions of NUT, which is fine by us,
but RHEL users need to balance their need for stability with the need
for features and new hardware support. If it becomes a problem, one
could run a new version of RHEL or Fedora on a system directly
connected to an UPS, and connect the older RHEL systems to upsd over
the network.
The FreeBSD Project has similar maintenance services, although I would
say that they are more proactive at upgrading the version of NUT in
their ports tree. However, their maintenance method is to put patches
in the ports tree without notifying the NUT project directly - so we
have to discover them ourselves. Eagle-eyed readers will note that the
FreeBSD buildbot slave does not have IPv6 enabled, whereas the ports
tree does. Fortunately, it seems that there is only one ports tree to
track (for FreeBSD, anyway) but it is still an extra burden on
developers who are mostly using other POSIX-like systems.
P.S. In any case I will try to install and to do some experiments
with the
device in question (Ippon Back Power Pro) on the both current
FreeBSD releases
(8.0 and 7.2). Major rewrite of the usb support that was done in the
8.0 release
gives me an insight that there will me major differences in how does
the hanged
device behave on the 7.2-RELEASE vs. the 8.0-RELEASE.
I guess the short answer for your case is that we will certainly
consider patches related to 7.2, and we won't try to intentionally
break 7.2, but I will be focusing on 8.0 for now.
The NUT release schedule question deserves its own thread.
_______________________________________________
Nut-upsdev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/nut-upsdev
