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## 1. Introduction

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.

### Note

Making NUT packaging more uniform should help its documentation, support and maintenance across the supported OSes.

    *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
    ...

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