[Asterisk-Dev] benevolent dictatorship, or inclusive developper community?

[Mark Spencer]

> the only thing that i can think at this point is that
> mark doesn't want sip to work through nat.

Right, you've caught me.  My goal has always been to prevent SIP from
actually working in Asterisk, because deep down I really just want the
whole project to fail.

Or maybe it's because (a) I was on "vacation" for two weeks and (b)
nobody has brought the bug/patch to my attention.

> i am getting very frustrated with digium's "benevolent
> dictatorship" of this project.

Then how about contributing by becoming a bug maintainer.  You can talk to
Brian West and he'll give you all the details you need.  Brian and the
other bug maintainers get special access to get bugs through, but the only
way to "scale" me is to have all the preprocessing done ahead of time
(make sure bug reports have backtraces if appropriate, are filtered, that
patches have already been tested, etc).

> how to make the asterisk project more inclusive of
> people's development efforts and contributions?

It is, you just have to know how to participate (which we don't have any
documentation about, I'll be happy to explain it to anyone that wants to
put together a document, just find me on IRC and I"ll explain everything
that I can and answer any questions you have).

> is it time to start thinking about a fork?

No, it's time to get more people helping.  We *do* have a structure to
Asterisk development that involves external help but what tends to happen
is that people only care about their one bug or feature and as soon as
that's taken care of, they lose interest in doing the hard work and effort
it takes to process bug reports and feature requests.  Only Brian West has
really stuck with the task, and he definitely will need some help.  If you
want to help, talk to Brian and he'll get you all the info you need.

Mark