[Nut-upsdev] instcmd "beeper.off "

[Arjen de Korte]

Peter Selinger wrote:

> Most UPS that I have seen support only "muting" the beeper; I haven't
> seen any that allow you to turn off the beeper permanently (although
> that is a theoretical possibility provided in the HID powerdevices
> specification). 

The MGE Evolution 650 supports this and possibly, other MGE models too.
And looking at the

> Muting is only possible when the beeper is already ringing, and only
> lasts until the next alarm condition. 

Yes. Paragraph 4.1.4 from this document is quite clear in that aspect.

> The renaming you suggest makes sense, but hasn't been done for two
> reasons that I can think of:
> 
> * backward compatibility (beeper.off has been documented since time
>   immemeorial)

This is something that worries me too. I certainly don't want to break
existing installations.

> * "off" is a more natural companion to "on".

It is. But time has also learned that people are confused by the name of
this command. I stopped counting users that complained that their UPS
was beeping, despite the fact that they ran the 'beeper.off' command.
Even though this is documented, it still is confusing.

> A good compromise might be to do the renaming you suggest, but also
> allow "off" as a synonym to "mute" for devices that don't implement
> the "real off" functionality. I.e.:
> 
> CMDDESC beeper.on "Enable the UPS beeper"
> CMDDESC beeper.mute "Temporarily mute the UPS beeper"
> CMDDESC beeper.off "Permanently disable the UPS beeper, if possible, else temporarily mute the UPS beeper"
> CMDDESC beeper.toggle "Toggle the UPS beeper"

I was thinking along the same lines too. However, this doesn't do away
with the confusion the old 'beeper.off' command causes and I really
don't like the idea that a command can have two (slightly) different
meanings. Therefor I want to propose the make the following change:

> CMDDESC beeper.on "Enable the UPS beeper"
> CMDDESC beeper.mute "Temporarily mute the UPS beeper"
> CMDDESC beeper.off "Disable the UPS beeper"

In drivers that are not known to support 'beeper.off' it would behave as
'beeper.mute', with the exception that we log an informational message
that the 'beeper.off' command should be replaced by 'beeper.mute'.

Best regards, Arjen