[asterisk-dev] Re: Command Syntax -- weird?

[Jared Smith]

On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 20:38 +1000, David Taylor wrote:
> You appear to be one voice of reason in a sea of ... 'others'.

Maybe you're just not getting the vision that the 'others' see...

> Asterisk needs consistency.
> Asterisk needs usable documentation.
> And, as you've pointed out, these are sadly lacking today :-(

Certainly we agree that Asterisk needs consistency and usable
documentation.  I see more and more consistency and more and more
documentation on Asterisk every day.  And, by the same token, I try to
contribute to both efforts, through reporting bugs, helping debug
problems, and by writing documentation.  (Shameless plug for the
Asterisk Documentation Project here -- we'd love to have you join and
help out!)

But consistency and documentation don't come for free.  Unfortunately,
we've had a lot of people come along, tell us we're doing everything
wrong, but not put forth any effort to either write Asterisk code or
documentation, and then throw up their hands and leave because they
thought we were ignoring them.  Those of us who have been active members
of the Asterisk community for a long time usually take a "wait and see"
attitude towards people telling us we're wrong.  If they're willing to
put in the time and effort to become part of the community and actually
do some work, we're happy to accept them and welcome their input.  (I've
seen numerous examples of this over the past several years.)  In short,
much of the open source world is a meritocracy. If it weren't a
meritocracy, Asterisk would only be the lowest common denominator of
everyone's ideas.

> And, as you've pointed out, Asterisk also needs the (good) technical 
> developers ... many of whom who have given you a hard time :-(
> But unfortunately, it seems that most can't see the bigger picture.

I completely disagree here.  Knowing many of the Asterisk developers
personally, I can attest that most of them (if not all) *can* see the
bigger picture.  They breathe Asterisk.  They drink Asterisk.  They live
Asterisk.

> What appears to be missing is a clear understanding of what Asterisk is 
> today; what it could be; and how to bridge that gap.

Who knows better what it is today than the people who have actually
written the code?

> Design and direction are not strong.

We accept patches :-)  Funny though... I haven't heard you speak up at
any of the developer conference calls, and don't remember seeing any
other input from you on the design of Asterisk.  As for the direction of
Asterisk, all I can say is that it will continue to move in the
direction that the *code* takes it.  While in theory it would be nice to
have a "master plan" of what Asterisk will be like in three years, it
doesn't work that way in practice.  Asterisk will only be able to do the
things that actually get coded.  And unfortunately, there are a finite
number of programmers that are core contributors to Asterisk.

Let me put it another way: working code attracts people who want to
code. Design documents attract people who want to talk about coding. [1]

> The Unix kernel and other leading Open Source projects show how it *can* 
> be done.
> They are open, but they also have strong leadership.
> They are 'open' in *so many* ways.
> Those who want to get involved in the internals can.
> And, those who just want to use it can do just that.
> It just works!

I don't see anything different with Asterisk.  Why is Asterisk any
different than Apache or PostgreSQL or any number of other open source
projects.  I'll bet if you went to either of those communities and told
them "Hey, you're doing it all wrong!" that they'd expect you to become
a core member of the community before they'd take your suggestions
seriously.

> I fear that soon you will give up your crusade.

I hope Peter doesn't give up his crusade either, because his work on
Asterisk documentation has breathed new life into the Asterisk
Documentation Project.  We're making some good progress in that
direction, and hope that others will join the project too and add their
effort to a great cause.

I hope I haven't offended anyone, but I had to say something. I don't
pretend to speak for the community, but I do know that several other
core members of the community feel the way I do.

-Jared

[1] http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2005/05/08/finding_discord_in_harmony