[Nut-upsuser] NUT Christmas mail

[Arnaud Quette]

Dear NUT users and developers,

As usual now, here is my end of the year announcement.

This year has been very overloaded on my side, and full of major
changes in the UPS world.
First, with MGE buying APC through Schneider (MGE's mother firm).
Then with MGE being disbanded, and partly sold to Eaton (the mother
firm of Powerware), and reborn under the name MGE Office Protection
Systems.

Those of you that have followed this story already know that I've gone
with the latter...

* The good news, that I've not had time to announce officially on this
list yet, is that I'm still there, and MGE Office Protection Systems
will continue to support NUT and the Free Software community in
general ^_^

I will now have more time to dedicate to various NUT subjects I would
have liked to push before (HAL, packaging standardization, doc,
website, testing and QA, lobbying, ...). It is still not 100 % of my
time, so I just hope that I will have your help to succeed more
quickly with all these things...

* Then, you should have seen the 2.2.1 release announcement.
It's not a major release, but it fixes many issues and add support for
a bunch of new models.

* Next is the long awaited MGE XML driver (mge-xml). I've started to
work on this driver, which will soon fill the lack for the newer MGE
(both UPS and OPS) network cards. It will have more features than
snmp-ups (using "mibs = mge"). This driver should appear in the trunk

* Now, I would like to thanks the whole NUT Development Team for their
huge dedication and support to the project. Without their work, this
project would not be as active and good as it is!

And as always, a big thank to MGE (Office Protection Systems now)
which gives me time to work on NUT and which widely support the Free
Software world. This should be promoted as an example for other
manufacturers.

* Now, the tasks for 2008 will be:
 1) NUT 2.4 (and possibly 2.6), including:
    * the new configuration format and tools integration,
    * the completion of the HAL integration (the command channel to
allow settings and UPS poweroff, along with the Policy Kit
integration), knowing that we already have something better than what
Windows and Mac OS X propose.
    * the documentation rewrite, using Restructured Text (RST), and
its use within the website,
    * the NUT Packaging Standard (aka NPS) to break to NUT packaging scattering.
 2) the website rewrite (using RST and PHP) to improve maintainability,
 3) solve the various remaining trackers (bugs, patches and features) and tasks.

This should keep us busy for some time, and improve a lot our users /
developers / packagers experience ;-)

Finally, I'm currently working hardly to have some more great news to announce.
But that will have to wait for January ;-)

I will be unreachable until Jan. 2nd, so I wish you all a Merry
Christmas and an happy New Year.
May the nut be with you...

Arnaud
-- 
Linux / Unix Expert R&D - MGE Office Protection Systems - http://www.mgeops.com
Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/
Debian Developer - http://people.debian.org/~aquette/
Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/