[asterisk-dev] MiniVM and message forwarding

[Watkins, Bradley]

I'm looking for a little guidance in my continuing quest to replicate
(and eventually surpass in functionality) app_voicemail with dialplan
and app_minivm.

I've got most if it working, with the only thing left really being
forwarding.  In app_voicemail, it boils down to using
ast_play_and_prepend to prepend a message to the original file, so
obviously I need to expose this in some fashion via a dialplan
application.

So the meat of the question comes down to where it should go, and at
exactly what level of granularity it should be exposed.

Off the top of my head, I would say it could be an option to Record().
This would have the side effect of potentially being useful other than
within minivm, but might be to fine-grained to make it practical for my
original stated purpose.  That said, it would be easy enough and perhaps
I'll add it anyway.

It could be and option to MinivmRecord, which would reduce the
proliferation of Minivm* applications (which may or may not be
considered a good thing or neutral).  This option is also fairly
congruent with the current separation between what the minivm
applications do versus what they expect a dialplan to accomplish.

The last option I came up with immediately was a MinivmForward app.  The
primary advantage here is that there might be some chicanery that's a
little easier to do in C as oppposed to the dialplan, with the
disadvantage that then you're tied to that functionality unless you want
to change the source and recompile (not an issue with me, but with
respect to users of the applications).

I'm leaning toward the middle ground, for the stated reasons.  But I'm
likely to be swayed by any particularly strong opinions both because I
think all of them would work (again, with the stated
caveats/disadvantages) and because I'd like to get it merged so I don't
have to maintain it out-of-tree.

Thanks in advance for your comments/suggestions,
- Brad