Packaging

A few posts ago I described the proof of concept for making my Tripplite UPS work despite the braindamage in the USB interface. Well, that UPS is even more expensive now, because to avoid having to redo all those hacks on a major OS update, you have to package the code. This means wrapping up all the little configs and scripts and other packages that also need to be installed, so that installing the package does all or almost all of the work for you.

I was also reminded of the importance of proper licensing. My original hack was based on hubpower, which has no license. This means I would have to contact the author and ask for written permission in order to distribute his code (or a compiled version). So for my package to be public, I had to adjust it to use hub-ctrl, which includes the written permission along with the code. This is a necessary feature of open source code if you expect anyone else to build on it. No one is going to take the time to contact you to get written permission.

So, after some more debugging with the new component, and some packaging, I have a mostly working version of trippfix. I still haven’t figured out how to disable hald-addon-hid-ups in the package. I have to manually kill it when rebooting. I do have a hal policy file, but it doesn’t work. Hal goes away in EL7 (having been assimilated into the borg…I mean systemd), so it is not worth spending too much time on it.