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

[Arjen de Korte]

>> 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.

Well, the present version as provided by openSUSE both 'provides' and
'obsoletes' smartups. I'm not sure if this makes sense, but this is how it
is done now.

[...]

>> 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.

The development package is irrelevant to most 'ordinary' users. This is
also not where the conflict is, since we have had this for a while
already.

>> (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?

Please do, that would free me to do other tasks (and I won't be in from
May 1-13 anyway). Thanks in advance!

> I could even try splitting the package myself is he agrees but doesn't
> have the time to do it.

I have already made the split in separate packages. I'll send you the
.src.rpm later today. Probably the most important thing that remains to
deal with is how are we going to make the move from 'nut' to 'nut-client +
nut-server + nut-cgi' in a more or less transparent way to unsuspecting
users (if this can be done at all).

Best regards, Arjen