[Nut-upsuser] NUT on Windows revival

[Jim Klimov]

Back from vacations, and before I dive into real-life work, I went over
some ideas and notes from the NUT for Windows effort.

Now they should be tracked at
https://github.com/orgs/networkupstools/projects/2/views/1 and community
help is welcome :)

I probably forgot or missed some caveats - so feel free to post issues for
this project if you think of some more...

Jim

On Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 23:52 Jim Klimov <jimklimov+nut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
>   After a hectic month in private life, as a byproduct I've got a viable
> merger of last released NUT 2.6.5 based Windows-ready codebase (thanks to
> the giants active a dozen years ago, on whose shoulders I stood today) and
> modern 2.8.x/master, fixing the merge conflicts and build warnings. Some
> details were tracked in discussion of
> https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/5
>
>   There are caveats, e.g. in a few files code was just hidden by `#ifndef
> WIN32` so making it "appear" would be a future trick, and some "silly"
> fallbacks for missing methods were hacked to make it build but probably are
> not thread-safe etc... but at least binaries do appear and some do run
> without crashing on Windows - e.g. usbhid-ups and nut-scanner did see my
> test UPS. Fixes originally made for libusb-0.1 were applied to libusb1.c
> too, but not tried yet.
>
>   Builds are possible, mostly scripted and documented, see:
>
> * `docs/config-prereq.txt` and `ci_build.sh` for MSYS2 (includes MinGW)
> natively on Windows,
> * `scripts/Windows/README` and a build script nearby for using mingw
> cross-building packages on Ubuntu Linux.
>
> Both of these produce lots of standalone usable binaries installable as a
> typical NUT directory tree, which (with copies of DLLs for third-party
> projects) "just work".
>
> The adventure starts with:
>
> :; git clone -b Windows-v2.8.0-1 https://github.com/networkupstools/nut nut-win
>
> I really hope that the community members more interested and better versed
> in the platform can pick it up from here, to discover and fix the missing
> and flawed bits, make sense of the installer, etc. and eventually make this
> codebase part of common NUT, multi-platform as it is.
>
> Sone points of interest OTOH:
> * c++ and a few drivers are currently effectively "neutered"
> * fcntl() code to avoid FD leaks to forked children, is it doable on
> Windows?
> * loading dlls from one dir, without copies near every exe (see common.c)
> * automatically tracking major version number X (from client/Makefile.am)
> for LTDL discovery of libupsclient-X.dll without hardcoding it
> * localtime_r, gmtime_r use ugly fallbacks where unavoidable
> * usb close_dev() crashes
> * not all dependencies were tried, probably more build warnings are
> lurking to clean up
> * installer not investigated
> * code mostly looks at "WIN32" macro as a big switch; there should be more
> specific configure-script tests for different versions, toolkits, build
> envs, IDEs... that are possible. Supported or not, WIN XP may still be a
> big thing...
> * clean up what `make install` does (e.g. no systemd/SMF on win)
> * automate copying third-party dlls for `make install DESTDIR=...`
> (recursive ldd?)
> * make sure that Linux/Mac/Solaris/BSD/... builds from this branch are not
> broken by that big code merge.
>
> On my side, curiosity is satisfied, itch scratched and bogus achievement
> achieved, so I plan to rest and then do other things. Really looking
> forward to you the reader to make the next iterations.
>
> When this codebase gets "good enough" to at least not fail to build
> against more and more third-party projects, I'll look at covering this in
> NUT CI so it does not regress with future evolution. This milestone is
> actually already viable now, just I'm leaving for vacation :-)
>
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