Nut upsdev - Sep 2009 - Evolution of the driver.list file

Fellows,

as you might have noticed, the online Hardware Compatibility List is
evolving a lot with the new website:
http://buildbot.ghz.cc/~buildbot/docs/r1940-91/website/stable-hcl.html

now, 2 more information are needed to provide better filtering and more
accurate information:
- the type of device, since NUT now support UPS, PDU and SCD,
- the support level, as it was discussed, to show which vendors support NUT
and which don't.
the rating is from 1 to 5 stars, with the following meanings:
*       protocol based on reverse engineering
**      based on fragments of publicly available protocol
***     based on publicly available protocol
****    vendor provided protocol
*****   vendor provided protocol and hardware

at first, I was thinking about putting these info into the drivers. but this
seems not to be the best approach.
putting this directly into the driver.list would be better.

the current format of this file is:
<manufacturer>\t<model name>\t<model extra>\t<driver
[parameters]>

the new format would be:
<manufacturer>\t<device type>\t<support level>\t<model
name>\t<model
extra>\t<driver [parameters]>

Since this file is not much computed currently (it's mostly useful for
configuration tools), we can break the format without worrying much.

Any comments?

cheers,
Arnaud
-- 
Linux / Unix Expert R&D - Eaton - http://www.eaton.com/mgeops
Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/
Debian Developer - http://www.debian.org
Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/nut-upsdev/attachments/20090902/f4566155/attachment.htm>

On Sep 2, 2009, at 5:33 AM, Arnaud Quette wrote:
> Since this file is not much computed currently (it's mostly useful  
> for configuration tools), we can break the format without worrying  
> much.
Sounds good to me.

We might want to take this opportunity to define a "version=2" header
of some sort, so that in the future, the tools will immediately know  
whether or not they are compatible. (At some point, we might want to  
move to a key-value format, especially if the information gets too  
sparse because of differences between PDUs and UPSes.)

Do any Linux distributions do any processing based on that file?