[asterisk-dev] application argument delimeters

[John Todd]

At 11:42 PM -0500 2007/7/24, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
>[snip]
>>  It has always been a value of this project to put forth a best effort to
>>  maintain backwards compatibility.  In the cases where we decide not to
>>  maintain compatibility, it has been done over a two release cycle.  The
>>  first one has marked a given option or syntax as deprecated, with
>>  appropriate warning messages any time they are used.
>
>The problem with this isn't a change which can really work with backwards
>compatibility.  Either you triple escape certain things or you don't, and
>trying to manage both is a recipe for ensuring that things that should work
>fine once the transition is complete won't.  As I commented on an earlier
>thread about this change, it's a flag day event, and there's no getting around
>that.
>
>The motivation is to get this changeover done as quickly and as soon as
>possible.  The longer we delay, the more pain this transition will cause.
[snip]

I would agree with Tilghman here.  There are already quite a few 
examples of deprecated applications turning into functions, which 
tend to break older dialplans already.  In other words: there exist 
already "flag day" changes from very old versions of Asterisk.  I 
agree with Russell in that backwards compatibility is a desirable 
thing when possible, but there are quite a few very confusing 
situations that arise with the flexible (one might say "chaotic") 
formatting available in the dialplan, and moving to a single version 
of the expressions is highly anticipated at least by myself and the 
other dialplan programmers that I speak with regularly.  If this 
comes at the cost of very old examples no longer working, I'm 
prepared to contribute to the effort of modern upkeep and I'll get 
myself in gear to revamp my example pages if they contain any 
problems with the new 1.4/trunk code.

JT