[Asterisk-bsd] Update on zaptel-bsd

Thu Jun 5 17:04:15 CDT 2008

[Digium hat on, but I don't feel like re-subscribing to this group 
from my Digium account.  Replies to jtodd at digium.com please.]

I've been in discussions privately on several occasions with Digium 
people about zaptel/DAHDI support for BSD, and there has been 
interest but some trepidation.  I will say that it's good to see that 
the zaptel (now DAHDI) drivers have been supported this well on *BSD 
for this long - it is a good sign that there is hope for them to be 
included in the mainline tree.  Now that I am a Digium employee, 
perhaps I can pull the strings a little harder.  :-)

Digium is not a *BSD shop, and they don't have the experience or 
platforms required to keep the drivers up to date on *BSD, and I'm 
sure they don't want to "support" *BSD as part of their commercial 
offering at this time.  I have had discussions with Russel Bryant, 
who seemed to think the addition of the drivers was a good idea 
though, but he's not the one to keep the zaptel/DAHDI code up to 
date.  I've asked the people in the hardware division if they would 
be interested in seeing that addition, and I'm sure they'll come back 
to me with a number of questions that I'll address here.

If I can get two people to commit themselves to keeping the *BSD 
derivatives up to date, and to fix things on BSD systems as DAHDI 
(nee zaptel) evolves over time, that would be a pre-requisite for 
getting this into the "mainline" portions of DAHDI.  It would 
probably need to support FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin at a minimum. 
Is NetBSD significantly different these days?  I haven't kept up.

I can guarantee nothing, only that I can get things started within 
Digium to have a serious look at making this part of the package. 
They may ultimately not choose to do it because of the complexity. 
Or perhaps it would be added as an "add-on" but that would still 
imply keeping it up to date.   However, I am almost absolutely sure 
in it's current state it would not pass initial examination.

Also at a minimum, perhaps a README file or some sort of instructions 
would be a good idea to put in the distribution - I used to be able 
to figure out how to get this working for OpenBSD, but it's no longer 
obvious and I don't have the hours to wrestle with different random 
trials to find my way in the dark.  Without documentation, the few 
brave Linux (and *BSD) folks who try to test this will quickly give 
up and move on to other tasks.

So, it would be great if the zaptel-bsd community could provide:

  1) Two volunteers for keeping the *BSD portions of the code up to date.
  2) FAQ, README, or other documentation on the distribution archive
  3) Support for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin in the package

If that is the case, I'll further try to get this adopted as either 
an add-on or basic portion of the zaptel/DAHDI distribution.  Again, 
I can't say it will happen, only that I will try.

JT

--
John Todd              jtodd at digium.com
Asterisk Open Source Community Director

At 8:34 AM -0400 2008/5/26, Richard Neese wrote:
>
>Last time I talked to digium about Asterisk+zaptel on bsd they said it was
>great we had ported it and it worked. But they would not support it. Asit is
>not on a linux platform that they support.
>
>They say they  have neither the time or the resources. and that if infact
>patches where sent in they woul dhave no way to test and review them.
>
>On Saturday 24 May 2008 04:10:10 Oleksandr Tymoshenko wrote:
>>  Aristedes Maniatis wrote:
>>  > On 23/05/2008, at 8:38 AM, Oleksandr Tymoshenko wrote:
>>  >>     OK, it's time to admit that our small team can't match
>>  >> the pace of Digium's full-time developers and merge all patches
>>  >> to zaptel-bsd sources in time. port and svn quite
>>  >> outdated. I tried to update them several times but was distracted by
>>  >> other things. The last time I decided to give a try to my old idea.
>>  >> Porting process is quite routine and bsd-only chunks of code were
>>  >> written a couple of years ago and hasn't been changed much since then.
>  > >> So it was obvious to automate this process with some kind of script.
>>  >> This script and its output could be found in -ng branch in zaptel-
>>  >> bsd svn.
>>  >>
>>  >> https://svn.pbxpress.com:1443/repos/zaptel-bsd/branches/ng/
>>  >
>>  > That URL requires a password. Is there anonymous access to the
>>  > repository?
>>
>>       Yeah, sorry, forgot to mention it:
>>  login: svn
>>  password: svn
>>
>>  > I spoke to Digium people (and specifically to Mark Spencer) at a
>>  > conference some time back and discussed the BSD community. They were
>>  > encouraging to the efforts. Would Digium accept your patches upstream
>>  > so they did not need to be maintained separately? Or do they not want
>>  > to take responsibility for testing each release on FreeBSD?
>>  >
>>  > Or would Apple be interested in helping the maintenance if it
>>  > ultimately might lead to Asterisk support on Darwin?
>>
>>       I haven't approached neither Digium nor Apple yet. What I have now is
>>  not a set of patches but perl code that maps Linux KPI to FreeBSD's one
>>  (where available), some compatibility layer and some logic tweaks that
>>  required by FreeBSD (like device cloning to get per-open instance softc
>>  struct). I'm not sure how far Digium is willing to go with it. It would
>>  be great if there were OS-dependent (locking, module wrapper, etc..)
>>  and OS-independent (logic, generic infrastructure operation) layers
>>  in order to reduce amount of code that should be maintained by OS
>>  community. It's my pipe dream for last three years :)
>>
>>  > Finally, this name change for zaptel that was announced: is it just a
>>  > name change, or is this a change in direction for the zaptel project?
>>
>>       It's just svn branch. Project name is still zaptel-bsd.
>
>
>
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