[Nut-upsdev] Heads-up: now it will be possible to manually select `subdriver` in `usbhid-ups`, and... looking at a release!

[Jim Klimov]

Hello all,

  Over the past years there have been several cases where I wished we could
specify an USB HID subdriver as easily as a subdriver/protocol combo in
nutdrv_qx or blazer drivers, or a MIB in snmp-ups driver. But never got
around to implementing that (nor convinced somebody else to do it).

  Finally, with https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/pull/2058 (currently
in CI testing), this ability should appear. In particular, it can help with
a sore point of "phoenixtec/liebert" and "mge" mappings which respond to
the same VID:PID identification and try to guess if some other clues about
the device fit the particular subdriver. Some reported regressions of NUT
v2.8.0 vs. v2.7.4 were about changes to this guesswork.

  On a grander scale, I think this is among the last large NUT-development
blockers I had burdening my conscience before unleashing a new release
(lack of which, in turn, makes many people sad about not receiving
long-completed bug fixes). Quite a few others were merged during recent
weeks, and hopefully packages based on current code would be easier for
end-users to deploy and for us as a community to remotely debug, than with
earlier releases.

  I think I'll wait a while for currently active PRs to complete, if they
would do so soon, but it seems prudent to ask the greater NUT user and
developer community to test custom builds of master branch with their
devices and use-cases, to help ensure no new bugs get delivered this time ;)

  Take a look at NEWS.adoc for the whole feature change set since the
previous release, and UPGRADING.adoc for highlights of the changes that are
expected to impact existing deployments and/or packaging recipes.

  On my side, I still have plans for some documentation changes, including
the tracking of HCL/DDL reports which are not yet formally logged, but this
is a chore that may spill over into the next release and should not be a
blocker. Help is welcome, though - example chores summarized at
https://github.com/networkupstools/nut-ddl/pull/38 and
https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/pull/2059 going from
https://github.com/orgs/networkupstools/projects/3/views/1 ;)

Jim
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