[Nut-upsdev] NUT on Windows

[Charles Lepple]

On Jan 17, 2010, at 9:21 PM, Alexey Loukianov wrote:

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> 18.01.2010 05:03, Charles Lepple wrote:
>> On Jan 17, 2010, at 8:31 PM, Alexey Loukianov wrote:
>
>> You might check to see if WinNUT uses any of the NUT core code, or if
>> any of the build system could help port the rest of NUT.
>
> WinNUT is monitor client only so it don't talk to USPes directly.  
> Will try to
> search google for cygwin port of libusb and NUT to Windows. Looks  
> like windows
> support it is not the frequently requested thing :-D.
>
>
>> The thing is, many of the devices that NUT supports are USB HID  
>> Class.
>> The easiest way to access HID Class devices in Windows is not to try
>> and talk HID protocol directly the way that we do with libusb, but to
>> use the Windows HID APIs.
>
> I hadn't had any experience with utilizing USB devices under Windows  
> but it
> seems to me that in case there are any working windows ports of  
> libusb, its API
> should be almost the same as it is for any other operating system.

It's not so much an API issue, but usability. libusb-win32 requires a  
driver. The forthcoming port of libusb-1.0 seems to be focused on  
WinUSB, so that eliminates older Windows installations.

> There's no
> point in porting common library to another platform and changing API's
> drastically along the way. It then would be easier to create a  
> totally new
> library with a different API that integrates best into target  
> operating system.

Funny you should mention that... This comes up a lot on the libhid  
mailing lists, but nobody has contributed a Windows HID API backend  
yet. http://libhid.alioth.debian.org/ for more details.