[Nut-upsdev] Roadmap to 2.7.3

Charles Lepple
Thu, 05 Mar 2015 16:06:16 -0000

For reference: https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues/10

On Mar 5, 2015, at 1:09 AM, Baruch Even <baruch at ev-en.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> There is one issue that I would consider as a major issue and not fixed
yet. It is the use of wall time for scheduling ups polls instead of a monotonic
clock source. I provided a (partial) patch in the past and I believe there was
some work on it.
>
> The bug manifests itself as a stop of monitoring with no alarm when the
clock is moved backwards in time.
>
> Please consider adding this to the release.

Hi Baruch,

What seems to have happened is that it was assigned to an Eaton contractor, and
it got tangled up in a C++ unit test framework branch that did not get fully
merged before the contract apparently ended. It was also tagged in GitHub with
the "2.8" milestone, probably with the understanding that there would
be a few more 2.7.x incremental releases in the mean time.

The issue list I mentioned for 2.7.3 is composed of two categories: small
patches with limited impact, and a larger issue that would affect a lot of
people (the NSS bug). While I think that monotonic clocks are the right solution
for polling timers in the long term, I would be surprised if a lot of NUT
installations worry about time going backwards, since that has big implications
for log traceability.

I am prepared to suggest releasing 2.7.3 with the NSS bug intact, since it fails
safe (although useless) and can be worked around with configuration (run upsd in
foreground). Documenting the handling of non-monotonic time as a known bug (with
a simple patch tested on Linux) is perhaps not equivalent, but given the
developer resource constraints we have had over the past year, I think it is not
out of the question.