[Nut-upsdev] Development news

[arnaud.quette@mgeups.com]

Hi fellows,

Just a quick update to inform you about the current developments,
before going on deserved holidays (as of this evening until 20/07).

The 3 main current points are:

1) Documentation:
================
We are working on an XML docbook base with P. Karatchentzeff.
The documentation will be split into a User Manual and a
Developer Manual.

A preview is available there:
http://opensource.mgeups.com/projects/nut-doc/nut_2.0.2_documentation.tar.gz

Download the above file, and call "make html" from the
root dir. The manual will be generated in the "html" dir.

There is only a base of the User Manual, and it needs
to be updated with the diff of the doc directory between
1.4.0 and 2.0.2, but it's a good base to show where we
are going...

2) Packaging:
============
I've begun to reintegrate packaging files
(debian and mandriva for the moment). All official
packaging files will be included, and unified as much
as possible. I'll then relaunch the NUT Packaging Standard
document (will be included in the Developer Manual), previously
known as "RFC: advices on packaging NUT". The aim will
be to ensure that NUT is well packaged everywhere and with
no other differences than the platform specific ones...

I also plan to make an helper script that will be called
when using "make pkg" and so on. It will take care
of calling the right command to install the needed
packages, create the build tree and build nut.

3) Dummy driver rewrite:
=====================
This week end, I've quickly rewriten the dummycons driver.
It's now replaced by dummy-ups, which is a real driver with
all that implies. For more information, have a look at
dummy-ups manpage by checking out the last Development
CVS using:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/nut login
 +enter
 cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/nut co -r Development nut

This driver is now built by default, and doesn't require to be run from
a console... It still miss some NUT data and value checking to validate
input data from the definition file. But it can load a sufficient set of data to
play with it using ie upsrw. Very useful for client apps developers and
more generally for NUT developers.

See you and may the NUT be with you ;-)
Arnaud Quette
---
Linux / Unix Expert - MGE UPS SYSTEMS - R&D Dpt
OpenSource Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/
Debian Developer - http://people.debian.org/~aquette/
... and much more ...