[asterisk-dev] Reintroduce deprecated applications

[Tilghman Lesher]

So I've been thinking about some of the recent criticism we've gotten about
deprecating applications in 1.2 (deprecation warnings that it seems that
everybody ignored), and subsequently removing the applications in 1.4.  The
reason we did that was because we found better ways to express concepts in
the dialplan, so we naturally wanted people to move to the better ways.  Since
we've gotten a lot of flack for that decision, I am floating the idea of
reintroducing those applications in 1.4, and possibly of never removing
dialplan applications at all.

To deal with the amount of possible extra applications floating around, I am
proposing setting up these applications so that they are by default unselected
for building, but may be reenabled very easily via the menuselect system.
Note that menuselect allows you to set up a configuration file in your home
directory, which would allow you to save your preferences as to which
applications will be automatically selected when you download a new release
and install.

The reason we would like to unselect by default the old applications is
twofold:  first, we would like to keep the default footprint small, and
second, we would like to continue to encourage new users to use the newer
methods.

Additionally, after some internal discussions at Digium, we are proposing that
these deprecated applications will get bugfixes and security fixes, but no new
features.

I am putting this out there in front of the community of developers to get
some feedback before we try implementing this.  I'm sure I haven't thought of
everything, so I hope we can have a discussion about this proposal.

-- 
Tilghman