[Asterisk-Dev] 'tonezone' in chan_zap.c

[Preston Garrison]

Hey brian do you have aim, icq, msn, etc I wouldn't mind talking to 
you.  I have already greatly enhanced the realtime engine for something 
i was working on myself.  I would mind putting my head together with 
yours rather then replicate each others efforts.  I cut out all the bs 
communication stuff and went direct to the core.  Which was not easy 
since everything is self contained on an island where the only way 
sip., iax, realtime, etc can communicate with each other is through a 
message in a bottle :)

However something to keep in mind we were all newbies once.  It seems 
that once developer get inside that close knit circle they seem to 
forget that it was a bitch to get into it in the first place.  Its 
funny some of the developers who all wanted to fork, bitched and moaned 
on end about how they treat developers, now sing completely different 
tunes now that they are part of the "in crowd"

All I am saying is we were all new once, a 2 second question being 
answered could save me 5 hours in grep time.  However I guess people 
would rather spend an extra 30 seconds possibly flaming me, instead of 
just helping me in the first place. :)


Preston Garrison
direct: 877-748-4142
fax: 310-774-3901
cell: 623-748-4140

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Capouch <brianc at palaver.net>
To: Asterisk Developers Mailing List <asterisk-dev at lists.digium.com>
Sent: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 18:36:29 -0500
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Dev] 'tonezone' in chan_zap.c

Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
 > Preston Garrison wrote:
  > >> I don't think it would hurt to have less of an attitude with 
these >> type of things. Alot of really good developers don't have alot 
of >> time to poor through endless tens of thousands of lines of code 
to >> find out the answer to a simple question. I think asterisk is 
missing >> out on alot of > > > "poor (sic) through endless tens of 
thousands of lines of code"? Give us > a break, please. Noone suggested 
that the poster needed to read and > understand all of Asterisk and 
Zaptel, but given that he had a specific > question about a 
configuration option, do you really think it would take > more than a 
5-second 'grep' to find the code related that option?
 >
  Hey Kevin, noone (sic) should mock people for the typos in their 
emails, huh? We all get in a hury sometimes ;-)

  > In fact, a simple 'grep' for 'tonezone' shows enough hits for just 
about > anyone to figure out what's intended for.

  Yep. And then once the grepper pulls up the files, he can use the 
voluminous comments in the code itself then, to penetrate the logic of 
the half-dozen people who have separately hacked the code over time.

  I am doing a class about Asterisk this semester at the little college 
where I teach, and one of the first things I told my students was, 
"Don't post to the Asterisk lists!! Ever!!"

  The truth of the matter is that the guru types on the Asterisk lists 
are far quicker to act like dicks to those who they deem beneath them 
than on any other OS list I subscribe to. Whenever someone calls them 
out, they immediately cop this, "We're not being dicks; we're just too 
busy to screw with newbies" answer.

  On the -users list I have come to appreciate Steven's helpfulness, 
even though it comes with the price of his occasional snippishness.

  But on -dev, the rule of the day is that questions *about* the code 
are discouraged, even though this product is arguably the 
least-well-documented code I have ever tried to plow through.

  In my own case, I've been reading code for weeks, trying to figure out 
just how to use (and extend) the Realtime engine. The Wiki has some 
documentation, but it is cursory, self-contradictory, and in general of 
very limited use.

  The code? Well, there's not a shred of documentation anywhere 
internally, and to make the chase interesting, there are data 
structures sprinkled about that define structures of pointers to 
functions, indirect calls to those functions buried uncommented inside 
other functions, and then for good measure a whole function defined as 
a macro (REALTIME_COMMON). To that add fragments of functionality 
scattered throughout the pbx code, the configuration parser, the 
various channels, and the resources directory, and the thought of 
someone just reading it and coming to a good understanding becomes 
vanishingly small.

  That sort of thing is withstandable when you can fire off a mail to 
the developer and ask for some quick direction. Oftentimes a couple of 
sentences from the person who wrote the code can be enough to 
jump-start what is otherwise a futile exercise in reading someone 
else's mind.

  But not this bunch. We are kept at bay by watching as the important 
people flame anyone on the outside who dares to ask for a bit of 
direction.

  I am not so much angry about this as disheartened. IMO, many people 
could be made into contributing members of the developer 
community--something I hope that everyone agrees is needed--but for 
their lack of enough of a masochistic bent to actually dare to ask for 
some background on this list and then be flamed to a crisp.

  I'll shoulder on, and I'm sure the other posters here today will too, 
because the project is bigger and more important than any of our 
respective egos.

  But dealing with all of this makes me pine for the sort of spirit I 
commonly see on other lists I'm on, where the developers are quick to 
help, and encouraging to those who are at a lesser stage of experience 
with the code than they are. They know in the end their patience will 
help make the product better.

 B.
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