[Nut-upsdev] recent and planned changes

[Peter Selinger]

* I committed into CVS the gendb patch that I sent to the mailing list
  on September 12. Arnaud, I hope you approve of this patch; it is
  more reliable than the previous method in tracking the correct
  dependencies.

* This, together with some other minor recent changes on the
  Development branch, is between the "before_PSE_3" and "after_PSE_3"
  tags. Arnaud: if you approve these changes, it is probably a good
  idea to remove the extra tags at some point. 

* The regular expression matching module on the regex_branch is now
  complete. It works great for me. Give it a try. With "-D -D", you'll see 
  sufficient debug messages to see what's being opened and what is
  being matched. Please let me know when I should go ahead and merge
  these changes into the main Development branch. 
  
  This also improves the logic of device opening and reopening. The
  newly added "matcher" callback interface is documented in comments
  in libhid.h and libhid.c.

My next projects are:

* clean up the newhidups code structure so that headers go in .h
  files, and code goes in .c files. This also involves correcting
  attributes such as "static", "extern" etc, where necessary.

* separate the Vendor-specific code from the core newhidups driver.
  This primarily involves replacing the various "switch (Vendor)"
  statements by a more general method, so that new Vendors can be
  added more easily in the future. My plan is that each vendor module
  supplies a set of callback functions for performing vendor-specific
  tasks, including: - deciding whether a given device is supported by
  the module or not, - custom-formatting the human-readable UPS
  description, - supplying custom Usages etc. All this goes in the
  <vendor>-hid.c source file. The newhidups.c core driver will only
  get a list of available vendor modules, and will delegate any
  vendor-specific tasks to the above-mentioned callback functions.

-- Peter