Packaging is a final aim for software. It eases and completes the software integration into an OS, and allows users to have an easy software installation and support out of the box.

*sandbox*
This document assumes that you have read the other NUT documents such
as INSTALL.nut, FAQ, config-notes.txt, config-prereqs.txt ...

Facts about NUT packaging
=========================

NUT has so much evolved those two last years (with USB and SNMP
support, the premises of libraries, ...) that the simple
"1, 2 or 3  package(s)" approach is no more suitable.

This fact has reached a high level since NUT 1.4. Actually,
doing this would result in either being forced to install hosts
of unneeded dependencies (net-snmp, gd, ... as seen on SUSE),
to have a partially broken package [1] or not being able to
use all NUT features [2].

Let's now have an overview on how NUT is currently packaged:

        1) Debian:
        http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nut.html
                nut, nut-dev, nut-usb, nut-snmp, nut-xml, nut-cgi, nut-doc

        2) Mandriva
        http://cvs.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/SPECS/nut/
                nut-server
                nut
                nut-cgi

        3) SUSE / Novell
                nut

        4) RedHat

        5) PLD
        http://cvs.pld-linux.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/SPECS/nut.spec

        ... (FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, IRIX, NetBSD, OpenBSD)

This shows how much the packages name split is now scattered.
The result is:
- that a user of several systems will be lost, and will
waste time
- there is a big waste of energy
- this makes things hard to create standard configuration
wizards

[1] NUT build on Debian GNU/Linux m68k and Hurd was once
broken due to hiddev dependencies, and usb support still
included in the core package.

[2]
- snmp-ups driver is not available under Mandrake GNU/Linux,
but its man is present. See
http://rpms.mandrakeclub.com/rpms/mandrake/9.1/i586/Mandrake/RPMS/nut-server-1.2.1-4mdk.i586.html
- secured ssh network mode not available (due to deps and/or non free)
- some systems don't provide libupsclient lib/header/.pc so as to
client application (such as wmnut) can't be built
- the logger function is not (well) used, same goes for the syslog (triple
redundancy in Mandriva)
- the solution is partial in every system: lost of tests
case / feedback could be shared
...