[asterisk-dev] [design] Matching algorithm

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 03:20:43PM -0500, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> > To answer your question from my perspective, given:
> > > > Now, we are not going to change this behavior in 1.4, certainly.
> > > > That has the potential to break currently working dialplans, and
> > > > where we can reasonably foresee such an outcome, we'd like to
> > > > avoid that.
> > > >
> > > > However, this is certainly an unintended behavior, and the
> > > > question then becomes, do we document this as a way to override
> > > > the pattern match algorithm, or do we change the lowercase class
> > > > letters to behave the same as the uppercase class letters?
> >
> > Unless I'm misunderstanding you, the latter alternative directly
> > contradicts the assertion in the first graf: you can't. If you think
> > people are depending on the undocumented "override" behavior, then
> > you have to maintain it.
>
> I disagree.

You disagree that "we are not going to change this behavior" conflicts
with "[do] we change the lowercase letters to behave the same..."?

Cause that's what I asserted.

>                If we fail to document a behavior, then it's accidental
> functionality, and it's subject to change at any time. Atis is going
> through this now, in another thread, as he's hooking an AEL routine
> from ARA, a behavior that we never documented would work, and upon
> looking back at it, we would never want to support. It's just too
> hairy a proposition that we would support unintentional functionality
> (especially as it CAN be viewed as a bug).
>
> The design proposition by which I started this thread is the question
> of whether we would WANT to support this functionality. The consensus
> thus far appears to be against supporting this functionality, and
> indeed, for removing it altogether.

That's fine, but it seems inconsistent with "Now, we are not going to
change this behavior".

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
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