[asterisk-dev] code-cleanup concerns

[Steve Underwood]

Mike Taht wrote:

>
>
> On 4/15/06, *Steve Underwood* <steveu at coppice.org 
> <mailto:steveu at coppice.org>> wrote:
>
>     I think you might be a little confused. The primary goal of Asterisk
>     development is to make the patches in Mantis rot, until their
>     developers
>     finally get tired of updating them and cease all contributions to
>     Asterisk. I thought everyone here knew that.
>
>     Regards,
>     Steve
>
>
> Up until the switch to svn at the beginning of the year the situation 
> with getting patches into asterisk was unbearable.
>
> Now, at least, with olle's test-this-branch, there's something of a 
> linux-mm thing happening, which has broken some but not all of the 
> bottlenecks. I would love to see asterisk get on a 6-8 week 
> development cycle similar to that of the one of the kernel, with some 
> sort of explicit contract to the frustrated developers - "OK, your 
> patch is going into the mainline on the next cycle, be ready")
>
> so (and with a little competition from projects like freeswitch) - 
> it's getting better, but is still way too painful (unless you are 
> already used to the pain of trying to get a arm patch into glibc, for 
> example). There are a bunch of out of tree modules that are 
> effectively unowned now (format_mp3, chan_bluetooth) and a few worthy 
> ones (like steve's fax work) that need some love from asterisk central 
> and more testers...

Nothing that matters to the majority of users, and fills the mailing 
lists and IRC channels with problems - things like:
    - robust echo control
    - robust jitter management for all media streams
    - proper codec dependent handling of PLC, plus use of my generic PLC 
by all media stream
    - robust carriage of FAX across the PSTN interfaces
    - T.38

really appear anywhere significant on the Asterisk development radar, 
while....

> At the same time, when there are major architectural changes happening 
> (like the changes to the loader), it's hard to keep everything working 
> without maximum breakage. I did take a look at the roadmap laid down 
> at last year's astricon and felt a lot better about things (see 
> http://www.sineapps.com/news.php?rssid=139 for details).... perhaps a 
> review of where all this is at is in order:

.... absolutely everyone absolutely needs a new loader. :-)

Regards,
Steve