[Nut-upsdev] ETIME on FreeBSD

[Charles Lepple]

On Jan 24, 2010, at 5:45 PM, Alexey Loukianov wrote:

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> 24.01.2010 17:06, Charles Lepple wrote:
>>> What versions of the FreeBSD are considered to be "current" from  
>>> the NUT
>>> perspective?
>>
>> I have pretty much given up on versions older than 8.0, and I don't
>> have the time to track FreeBSD-CURRENT.
>>
>
> Does it mean that earlier versions of FreeBSD are considered  
> unsupported by NUT
> development team and the will be no support offered in case there  
> are any issues
> with the NUT compilation or behavior on legacy systems?

I should clarify that - I personally have given up on the *USB stack*  
in earlier versions of FreeBSD. The behavior of serial ports across  
different Unix variants is pretty standard, so I don't expect any  
surprises there.

We are generally open to helping users get NUT running on other  
versions of FreeBSD, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect NUT  
developers to have a wide variety of versions of the OS waiting in the  
wings. (Yes, we could use virtualization, but when it comes to USB, we  
have two problems: too many versions to test, and a bunch of  
virtualization bugs to track down.)

> Latest release (2.4.1) was done about a year ago (Feb 2009) and  
> accordingly to
> the SVN log there were a lot of the useful changes (that are surely  
> demanded by
> the NUT users worldwide) since then. It is widely common for the linux
> developers to use half-a-year release cycle (RedHat, Canonical, KDE,  
> Gnome) and
> I think that it might be good to try to stick in with the same  
> policy for the
> NUT releases. It might give a better integration into the major  
> distributions
> like Fedora or Ubuntu and will offer the end-users with a better  
> service
> (unfortunately it is common for the linux end-user nowdays not to be  
> familiar
> with the SVN and with the software installation from the source code).

Not sure what the other developers think about this, but as a user, I  
would prefer that a package like NUT didn't change as much as the  
desktop distributions do. The less that we change, the less that needs  
to be re-tested, and two years after deploying Buildbot, all we are  
automating is the build cycle.

"Because they're doing it" is not a reason in and of itself.

> The question concerning the offer of the some support level to the  
> older linux
> and FreeBDS distributions seems to be one of the most important to  
> me as the NUT
> is at its nature (primarily) a sysadmins tool that is most likely to  
> be used in
> the server room or in the datacenter and it is not uncommon for the  
> such
> installations to still use legacy hardware and software.

By that argument, we probably shouldn't have USB support (since it is  
not as well-established and tested as serial).

> As I had already
> mentioned in one of the mailings there are still a lot of  
> installation of the
> even such an old beast as the RHEL3 out there in the corporate  
> world. RHEL4 will
> be supported by RedHat for about two additional years starting from  
> now. If I
> had the correct understanding of the FreeBSD Project release  
> schedule at the
> current moment there are two branches that are supported: 7.x and  
> 8.x. Security
> updates will be also offered for the 6.x branch until the 30th of  
> November,
> 2010. This means that it would be good for the NUT to compile and  
> work correctly
> not only on the 8.x branch but also at least on the 7.x branch of  
> FreeBSD.
>
> Does it make sense or am I missing something?

These two examples are cases where the supporting organization has  
taken the NUT software and folded it into their own distribution.  
RedHat tends to stick with older versions of NUT, which is fine by us,  
but RHEL users need to balance their need for stability with the need  
for features and new hardware support. If it becomes a problem, one  
could run a new version of RHEL or Fedora on a system directly  
connected to an UPS, and connect the older RHEL systems to upsd over  
the network.

The FreeBSD Project has similar maintenance services, although I would  
say that they are more proactive at upgrading the version of NUT in  
their ports tree. However, their maintenance method is to put patches  
in the ports tree without notifying the NUT project directly - so we  
have to discover them ourselves. Eagle-eyed readers will note that the  
FreeBSD buildbot slave does not have IPv6 enabled, whereas the ports  
tree does. Fortunately, it seems that there is only one ports tree to  
track (for FreeBSD, anyway) but it is still an extra burden on  
developers who are mostly using other POSIX-like systems.

> P.S. In any case I will try to install and to do some experiments  
> with the
> device in question (Ippon Back Power Pro) on the both current  
> FreeBSD releases
> (8.0 and 7.2). Major rewrite of the usb support that was done in the  
> 8.0 release
> gives me an insight that there will me major differences in how does  
> the hanged
> device behave on the 7.2-RELEASE vs. the 8.0-RELEASE.

I guess the short answer for your case is that we will certainly  
consider patches related to 7.2, and we won't try to intentionally  
break 7.2, but I will be focusing on 8.0 for now.

The NUT release schedule question deserves its own thread.