For more information about build environment setup, see chapters below about Configuration prerequisites and CI Farm configuration notes.
As many other projects relying on GNU autotools for build recipe automation,
NUT sources deliver a configure script which is used to set up numerous
nuances relevant for your build of the project. Most of the configuration
requirements are passed by --with-something or --enable-something options
(allegedly, not always used consistently with autotools naming recommendations),
and with environment variables like CFLAGS typically also passed as command
line options.
Default syntax of --with-something or --enable-something assumes a boolean
approach, so the option as such conveys a yes string value, and aliases
--without-something or --disable-something are handled automatically as
a no string value, for the option named something.
In many cases, these options are used to pass non-boolean configuration of the option in question, commonly a path, program name, compiler flags to use along with a particular dependency, user name or type of documentation to build, etc.
A special case here concerns options that accept an auto value, where the
configure script would opine to request a final yes or no, depending on
other circumstances of the build environment and requested configuration.
When building NUT from Git sources rather than the distribution tarballs,
you would have to generate the configure script and some further needed
files by running ./autogen.sh. This in turn may require additional tools
and other dependencies on your build environment (referenced just a bit
below). For common developer iterations, porting to new platforms,
or in-place testing, running the ./ci_build.sh script can be a helpful
one-stop solution.
The NUT Packager Guide, which presents the best practices for installing and integrating NUT, is also a good reading.
The Prerequisites for building NUT on different OSes document suggests prerequisite packages with tools and dependencies available and needed to build and test as much as possible of NUT on numerous platforms, written from perspective of CI testing (if you are interested in getting updated drivers for a particular device, you might select a sub-set of those suggestions).
There are a few options reviewed below that can be given to configure
script to tweak your compilations. See also ./configure --help for a
current and complete listing for the current version of the codebase.
NUT tracks configure options used during build, so you can view them
to produce a replacement by asking NUT programs for --help or for
--version with debugging enabled (first), e.g.:
:; upsd -DV Network UPS Tools upsd 2.8.1 Network UPS Tools version 2.8.1 configured with flags: --with-all=auto --with-doc=skip ...
A more industrial approach is to use lib/libupsclient-config --config-flags,
where supported. Note that the pkg-config manifest libupsclient.pc does
not easily convey this information.