NUT v2.8.0-rc1

Hello, fellow NUTs!

It is with a [happy] heart that I must proclaim today, that the long reign of NUT v2.7.4 is coming to an end. Its anticipated successor of half a dozen years, release-in-waiting NUT v2.7.5 has also quietly expired, and [won't] be sorely missed. They were survived by the next name in line, NUT v2.8.0(-rc1). Le NUT est mort, long live the NUT!

Along just this leg of the journey, NUT codebase survived at least four separate CI farms and technologies to make its builds easier and more reliable, all while succeeding on a wide range of CPU and OS platforms, ranging from current distros to the dawn of millenium (nearly-immutable appliances and sturdy reliable servers matter too!), as well as multiple generations and implementations of compiler toolkits, "make" and scripted code interpreters involved.

We are grateful to the many freely available projects, services and communities who helped us in particular (maybe unwittingly) and the FOSS ecosystem in general (intentionally), such as (and not limited to) Asciidoc, Autotools and family, BuildBot, CCache, Clang/LLVM, FossHost, GCC, GitHub, Google, illumos, Jenkins, LiberaChat, Proxmox, QEMU, StackExchange, Travis, ZeroMQ... bits here, swathes there - it would have been much harder without the likes of them (and many others).

Advances in compiler code analysis in particular, as is seen on a daily basis with CI non-regression builds across the range of 10 major releases of clang and 7 of gcc, are immense. At times annoying, yes, but they led to a great cleansing of the codebase from questionable code (and indeed some potential bugs). And it was possible to do so in a way that all those regularly tested systems are satisfied, so the codebase stays clean and green and portable as we iterate new contributions, and merged with peace of mind many ports and features from long-awaited branches (such as libusb-1.0+0.1 support finally), or forks (notably 42ity/nut).

Let me take a moment to tender our special thanks from both the maintainer team and countless users of UPS, ePDU, solar panel and similar hardware, to numerous personal and corporate contributors of new drivers and features or fixes for existing ones, as well as to community members who ask and answer questions, and who log github issues with their ideas, experiences or grievances.

As always we would welcome people willing to regularly share their expertise in certain areas and tools (such as solving many practical mysteries around USB), or protocols (more active experts on prolific Qx family would be great for PR reviews), or packaging, service and distro integrations, or HCL/DDL maintenance based on reports trickling in... just about anything!

While we have a lot of features queued to complete or port for the next releases (hopefully with a healthier cadence), we expect to see more feedback by exposing the release, and hope for little fallout from the many changes made while cleaning up the warnings.

Handing over to community last-minute testers, and hereby alerting creative packagers now...

Jim Klimov,
on behalf of the Network UPS Tools Project