[Nut-upsuser] Wishlist: Absorb apcupsd features and device support that may be still missing in NUT

[Jim Klimov]

Hello all,

  For those who don't know me (e.g. in the cross-post to apcupsd-users), I
am Jim Klimov, a maintainer of the Network UPS Tools for over 5 years now,
and a user->contributor during about 20 years before that.

  My main focus during the recent years was, and remains, to ensure that
NUT can help all running computers to be protected from outages by graceful
shutdowns with modern UPSes. This includes computers (and their operating
systems) released since roughly 2000: boxes may still be running with
whatever OS and compilers they had at the time, because vendors may be long
gone. While they could be running NUT (or apcupsd) back then, an UPS
replacement might involve a device made in the past few years which the 20+
year old builds of our software running there had no idea about. As a
result we have a large CI build matrix ranging from CentOS 7 and occasional
Solaris 8 to cutting-edge distros (POSIX and Windows), with various
implementations of make, compilers, shells and other tools, with different
CPU architectures and complaining about different nuances, and each NUT
iteration should pass on all of that before getting merged. There's always
a heap of work to clean up the code, but it gets smaller over the years :)

  Over here at NUT we recognize that the apcupsd project delivers some
features and abilities, especially regarding certain device and
media/protocol support, where NUT lacks. Some things like MODBUS USB
support caught up years later, and might still need improvements.

  Sadly, to the best of my knowledge, `apcupsd` source code over at
https://sourceforge.net/p/apcupsd/svn/HEAD/tree/ (copy stashed at
https://github.com/networkupstools/apcupsd) has not seen releases nor even
development for almost 10 years now. And according to chats at the latest
FOSDEM, some distros are considering dropping it as effective abandonware :(

  I would like to propose a friendly merger of the two GPLv2+ codebases
with allegedly shared parentage, so our shared population of end-users do
not miss out on some functionality that apcupsd delivers now when/if the
time comes that it itself is not delivered, and they (have to) migrate to
NUT. And so that the decades of work invested there are not lost to
posterity.

  First of all, able hands are called on board to walk over the code and
run-time usage (with some device in tow) to compare functionality and map
out what NUT is missing, so we might specify concrete issues and file PRs
eventually. Of particular interest might be some tools or clients
introducing concepts that NUT lacks (if any).

  I've defined a GitHub label
https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues?q=state%3Aopen%20label%3Aapcupsd
to track related new issues/PRs, and will try to add it over time to
existing records to help cross-referencing and search.

  This matter is also raised as
https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/3301

Thanks in advance,
on behalf of the Network UPS Tools project,
Jim Klimov
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