[Nut-upsuser] Network UPS Tools version 2.2.2-pre2 released

[Jean Delvare]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:29:50 +0200, Arjen de Korte wrote:
> Jean Delvare wrote:
> > You might be able to solve this problem with rpm tags such as:
> >
> > Provides:    nut:<one key file which "moved" from nut to nut-server>
>
> The openSUSE distribution (formerly, SuSE) already has such a tag, 
> 'smartups'. This is used for both NUT and 'apcupsd'. Basically, both add 
> UPS monitoring capabilities.

Actually, I think that nut "obsoletes" smartups.

The syntax I suggested tells Yast (or whatever package manager) that
a package now contains a file that was previously contained by another
package. It is specifically designed to be used when a package is split.
With this information, Yast can automatically select the right packages
during an update (in a conservative way).

> The problem we have now, is that (historically) openSUSE has always used 
> a single RPM package for NUT ('nut'), while most of developers 

Actually there's nut and nut-devel at the moment.

> (including me) prefer to split this up in 'nut-client', 'nut-server', 
> 'nut-cgi', 'nut-snmp' and 'nut-xml'. Over time, we have added drivers to 
> NUT that have specific requirements for installed libraries, some of 
> which are pretty big. If you don't use these drivers, there is no need 
> to install these libraries.
> 
> Therefor, on a system that will be a NUT client only, you probably don't 
> need 'net-snmp' or 'neon' which are requirements for the 'snmp-ups' and 
> 'netxml-ups' driver respectively. Even for a NUT server, if you don't 
> use these drivers, you don't need the libraries (at least not for NUT).
> 
> This is why we prefer to bundle these in separate RPMs, to keep the list 
> of dependencies as short as possible. However, since openSUSE bundles 
> 'nut-client', 'nut-server' and 'nut-cgi' in one package 'nut', we should 
> probably do the same (Arnaud is right about that), to prevent breaking 
> existing installations where users don't realize that the openSUSE 'nut' 
> package contains a lot more than the 'nut' package we provide.

I agree with your approach and I would like to see the nut package
split in openSuse as well. Packages drawing lots of dependencies are no
fun when you are short on disk space. Do you want me to discuss this
with Stanislav? I could even try splitting the package myself is he
agrees but doesn't have the time to do it.

-- 
Jean Delvare