[Nut-upsdev] Opening the 2.4 commit fest

[Arnaud Quette]

2008/11/15 Charles Lepple <clepple at gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 5:42 PM, Arnaud Quette <aquette.dev at gmail.com> wrote:
>> fellows,
>>
>> You can now commit to the trunk everything that is scheduled for 2.4
>>
>> For my part, the november month will be mostly dedicated to the following:
>> - commit the USB "improved maintenance" code. I'm about to finish that
>> one, which allows to extract USB info and generate the various USB
>> related files (hotplug, udev and hal). so the end of that bothering
>> era ^_^
>> - complete & merge the upsdrv-info-struct branch
>> - complete & merge the make-package branch
>> - commit the PDUs support
>> - some more update related to Eaton
>
> One thing that was on the plate (but we haven't discussed much) is the
> new configuration file format.
>
> I prefer that we keep the new configuration file code out of 2.4,
> since there are a lot of other changes on the TODO list, and we
> haven't really discussed it much. Also, there is the problem of
> transitioning people to the new format - since a lot of the NUT users
> get NUT from a Linux distribution, it will get confusing unless we
> have some way to support both file formats.

if you refer to Jonathan's work (newconf branch), then sure, it's out
of 2.4 scope (though it was initially in!)

now, I'd like to make the bare minimum improvements there by providing:
- a nut.conf file, whose sole purpose for now will be to store the
configuration type (none, standalone (inc. redundancy), network server
/ client)
this will help standardizing nut init and config over the distro, and
the removal of /etc/default/nut, /etc/sysconfig/ups, ...
- provide a basic upsconfig(.sh or .py?) with interactive and batch mode...

that should fit in 2.4

>> We will then have some more update to do on:
>> - the packaging/ files to be sync'ed,
>> - the documentation (will be kept as plain text for 2.4 ; html postponed to 2.6)
>>
>> The remainder, until the -pre stage, will be:
>> - the Powerman support (through the powerman driver) for more PDUs
>> - the possible RRD integration into upslog
>
> It would be nice to have native RRD support in upslog, but we may also
> want to point people to collectd - the NUT support in collectd is very
> easy to use, and collectd does a good job of monitoring other system
> statistics at the same time.

I'm not very knowledgeable there!
is rrd's end collectd? if so, we can discard this patch and point collectd!
otherwise, I have a few things underhand for RRD (m4, pkginfo contributed, ...)

> From the NUT perspective , an interesting set of statistics is the
> correlation between UPS load and CPU utilization.

interesting. I've just been invited to FossCamp / UDS, next december
at the Googleplex, to talk about that ;-)
green / cloud computing, power management, ...

this should be a great deal for nut improvement and integration (in
Ubuntu at least, though I hope there will be some other distro guys!)

cheers,
-- Arnaud