[Nut-upsuser] Question about nut-dependencies

[Charles Lepple]

On Aug 21, 2024, at 12:34 PM, Heath Smith via Nut-upsuser <nut-upsuser at alioth-lists.debian.net> wrote:
> 
> 1) Who is deciding what goes in to fink and port packages? Do the maintainers of NUT have any say with fink, Mac Ports, and Home Brew (for MacOs machines)?
> 
As Jim mentioned, the distributions like Fink and MacPorts are free to choose the subset of dependencies that they can easily handle.

Speaking as someone who coincidentally maintained the NUT package in Fink for a few years, it can be tricky to strike a balance between complexity and maintainability, and altering that dependency chain usually takes quite a bit of testing. I no longer have a working Fink install, so I would have to rely on others to test any changes.

That said, since Fink moved their package tree to Git a few years ago, it is not too hard to maintain a patch against upstream to trim down the dependencies. If you don't need the Eaton NetXML driver and its dependencies like neon, don't build it. You can change any "BuildDepends: foo" to a "BuildConflicts: foo", and remove the splitoff that packages that up (e.g. https://github.com/fink/fink-distributions/blob/master/10.9-libcxx/stable/main/finkinfo/net/nut.info#L225 ). Sometimes there are ./configure options that need to be removed as well, but usually the BuildConflicts will prevent the library from being visible to the configuration process.

Similarly, low-level USB support on MacOS has been withering away for some time now. It is especially difficult to detach the incumbent USB HID PDC driver, to the point that I wrote a separate NUT driver (macosx-ups <https://networkupstools.org/docs/man/macosx-ups.html>) to read from the system power monitoring code. libusb doesn't have a ton of dependencies, but it too is a candidate for the chopping block, especially if you are just monitoring a remote UPS on non-Mac hardware.

I'm not sure what that patch process looks like for MacPorts or Homebrew.

-- 
Charles Lepple
clepple at gmail
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