[Nut-upsdev] Asking hard questions about the NUT architecture

[Carlos Rodrigues]

On 5/30/07, Eric S. Raymond <esr at thyrsus.com> wrote:
> > Every application running as a daemon has a way to shut itself down.
> > If it does that by handling SIGTERM or some other mechanism is
> > completely irrelevant. What matters is that doing
> > "/etc/init.d/someservice stop" does the trick, and a UPS triggered
> > shutdown is going to do just that.
>
> *blink*  *blink*
>
> And a SIGPWR shutdown *isn't* going to do that?

For many apps, no.

> I regard that as a bug to be fixed, not an excuse for inertia.

Hardware being used in production systems creates inertia. How do you
propose we convince people to drop their hardware? They would drop
*us* faster.

> So, where did this myth arise that I want you to dispose of anything?

Errm... If I happen to hang new boxes on the "old" UPSes I'm going to
have to build an older NUT version from source. That sucks, would you
do that for me? Guess not.

> I'm quite confident
> I could write a zero-configuration lightweight monitor for
> single-USB-UPS/single-computer installations in Python using fewer
> than ten working days.

Ah! Finally something feasible. I never said you couldn't build some
alternative daemon to do whatever you wish. You could even interface
with NUT drivers directly. Now that completely different from stating
that the present NUT design should be dropped in favor of some simpler
(and weaker) solution.

Actually, it would even be a first. Some time ago something did just
that using the "megatec" (then "powermust") driver. If it happened to
not be limited to just a single driver, I guess it could had been
something worth looking at.

-- 
Carlos Rodrigues