After a long and windy trip since the last official release v2.7.4 half a dozen years ago, we the community, contributors and maintainers are proud to announce at last the general availability of NUT v2.8.0!
As always, the new release includes numerous new drivers, sub-drivers, protocols and bug-fixes, with many companies and individuals chipping in with contributions of code.Thanks to everyone involved in making this happen, inspiring the changes, and providing the open-source friendly infrastructure.
This release also culminates a significant effort in improvements of NUT QA and CI, and as a result -- in codebase quality and portability across a decade or two of recent platforms, third-party tools and other dependencies. As a side effect, public API (in headers and libraries) has changed a bit, hence a new semantic "minor" number is claimed for this major body of work.
During this time, the https://networkupstools.org/ web site has changed to a rolling-release model to serve current information to match the evolving codebase. There are now special Sub-sites for historic releases to keep documentation snapshots relevant for users of packages which are typically based on official NUT releases.
We recognize that NUT is an important piece of infrastructure which gets built into all sorts of devices, projects and operating systems -- some of which the team never heard of until they pop up in a question, and others we haven't heard of for years -- so we take a seriously omnivorous stance towards covering many versions and implementations of compiler suites, C/C++ revisions, make programs, shell and other scripted language interpreters, OSes and CPUs, and other similar variables tamed with our new NUT CI farm test matrix dynamically driven by currently registered build agents and their declared capabilities.
Sections in the NEWS and UPGRADING files about changes since last release are several pages long, so would not all be repeated here. A few important highlights for distribution packagers and custom builders follow, however:
- NUT now supports more i2c and modbus devices, as well as libusb-1.0 support as an alternative to earlier libusb-0.1 (so new dependency-based categories of packages for drivers may be due);
- NUT Python modules and scripts (e.g. NUT-Monitor variants) should work with python-2.7 and with python-3.x, so covering historic distro releases as well as new ones (and so your distro can deliver one or both, probably in several packages with different dependencies in the latter case);
- NUT provides revised reference systemd and SMF service unit definitions, including support of drivers wrapped into individual service instances with varying dependencies based on different media required (networked stack, USB stack, etc.), and many daemons include
-Foption for running "in foreground" to avoid extra forking after one already done by a service framework - you may want to use those in your packaged deliverables; - NUT newly provides the "nut-driver-enumerator" script and service, which allows it to follow edition of
ups.confand dynamically define+(re)start and stop+undefine service instances for drivers - there are several ways it can be integrated for different use-cases; - there are several new configuration keywords and CLI options - so while new NUT builds should work with old configs and scripts, the opposite is not necessarily true (old binaries may reject configurations taking advantage of new features);
- there are several new protocol keywords - but old and new NUT daemons (data server and clients) should be able to communicate both ways;
- it is assumed that API/ABI changes may require third-party NUT clients (library consumers of libnutclient, libupsclient, libnutscan... -- their version info was bumped accordingly) to get rebuilt, in order to work with the new NUT release in a stable fashion;
- the
dummy-upsdriver used in automated testing now processes*.devfilename patterns once and does not loop, like it still does for*.seqand other files (by default); - USB code is now more strict about logical minimum/maximum ranges for data reported from devices, and some devices were already found to make mistakes - so there is also a mechanism for turning a blind eye to known issues and fix-up such report descriptors to produce intended sane values;
- new documentation page
docs/config-prereqs.txthighlights packaged dependencies installable on a large range of platforms to build as much of NUT as possible (incidentally, ones NUT CI farm uses to test every iteration); - finally, we hope that NUT codebase might be able to cater for everyone "out of the box" (it also simplifies local builds from GitHub sources on any systems, for troubleshooting and checking pre-release enhancements): if you as a packager have to apply patches for your distribution, give it a thought -- whether they address a common issue best solved upstream once and behave similarly for everyone (and conversely, if your platform can do with existing solutions already tracked in the NUT version du-jour). PRs welcome! Or at least Wiki entries to list all the distro efforts for cross-pollination :)
A lot of effort and several rounds of community testing have gone into making sure that all these new features and bug-fixes and addressed warnings did not break anything severely, but... things might happen.
Still, there is always room for improvement and many known efforts that did not make it into this release got queued into the next. Likewise, there are some open issues about device/model/firmware-specific behaviors that are known but were not even addressed - we would always welcome help and PRs from community members with devices, debugging/coding skills, and time to spare.
In any case, we hope the next NUT releases will happen in a more manageable cadence ;)
Managing power can be fun, but mis-managing power can be dangerous. While we hope that new NUT release would not have fallout as spectacular and dramatic as from a certain other power monitoring and management system that failed 36 years ago today, please do take care with your electric experiments, and do secure your installations!
NOTE: After this release was cut, it was found that a late-coming feature did not let dummy-ups build on MacOS. A fix and ways to avoid such mishap from repeating are investigated under issue #1415 and would be part of next NUT release. Until then, you may have to build from master branch.