Nut upsdev - Jun 2011 - on Ubuntu Developer Summit (Oneiric), NUT and 2.8.0

Fellows,

I've been caught by real life, and didn't find time to share / discuss
this
with you.

I've been attending UDS Oneiric, from May 9 to 13 in Budapest, and had a
chance to present and complete some ideas around NUT:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerOneiricInfraPower

The end target is to have NUT ready to address infrastructures, both static
like data-centers and flexible like Clouds.

Part of the interesting NUT topics are:
- the nut-scanner, which is a WIP,
- the configuration library and tools, with some existing results (Augeas
lenses)
- the nut-ipmi driver, at first to monitor PSU (also WIP, first commit this
week),
- the PowerChain notion, which brings a global vision on both the protection
and the supervision of the electric network.

Part of this blueprint, and of a long run reflexion, I'm also considering
opening NUT to application data related to power (like PowerWake /
PowerNap):
the considered approach would be a driver that publish power related
information from this app, and allow interaction (calling commands and doing
settings, as for actual devices). This is still subject to discussion and
investigation, but it would really make sense to have NUT being a "general
power information provider".

All these are scheduled for 2.8.0, around September. There will also be:
- the work already done, like NSS support (as an alternative to OpenSSL) and
the maturing Windows port.
- a Java binding (jNUT), needed for Eucalyptus integration,
- some work around Avahi and mDNS / DNS-SD.

As usual, comments, feedback and help welcome ^_^

cheers,
Arnaud
-- 
Linux / Unix Expert R&D - Eaton - http://powerquality.eaton.com
Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/
Debian Developer - http://www.debian.org
Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/
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On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 6:08 AM, Arnaud Quette <aquette.dev at gmail.com>
wrote:
> All these are scheduled for 2.8.0, around September. There will also be:
> - the work already done, like NSS support (as an alternative to OpenSSL)
and
> the maturing Windows port.
> - a Java binding (jNUT), needed for Eucalyptus integration,
> - some work around Avahi and mDNS / DNS-SD.
This seems ambitious for a few months. Then again, there's the old
quote about the person saying it can't be done shouldn't get in the
way of the person who is making it happen :-)

A couple of vaguely related things:

 * For years we've said that the NUT project only publishes source
code, not binaries (leaving the binaries up to packaged
distributions). I realize that Windows is a special case (since so few
Windows users have a working software build infrastructure), but we
really should have a little more separation between the source code
and the Windows installer (such as giving it another download
directory outside of source/).

 * If meeting the release date is the top priority, what are the
priorities? Alternatively, if we are trying to release with a given
set of broader power management features, what is the minimum set
necessary to be useful? Is there a freeze date for Oneric that you are
trying to meet?

 * The Alioth outage is another reminder that we have a single point
of failure in the repository. Combining that with the wide array of
feature branches we will need to cover the goals mentioned above, it
might be a good idea to move to a DSCM like Git so that we don't have
complicated merge scenarios like the Windows branch. If a feature
isn't ready for 2.8.0 (I don't like assigning version numbers to
features, but I guess it's easier than picking a decent code name)
then we need a way to keep that branch up-to-date with respect to the
"trunk".

 *?I would also propose that one of the first commits on a feature
branch should be a little more description of the requirements, or
design ideas.

-- 
- Charles Lepple