[asterisk-dev] Reintroduce deprecated applications

[John Lange]

I don't have any particular strong feelings one way or the other on the
old applications other than to say that everyone likes a simple upgrade
path so keeping backwards compatibility is always nice.

My only question mark would be, if the applications are worth keeping,
aren't they worth improving? Why not accept patches?

It is completely reasonable to take the position that Digium is not
going to expend resources working on old applications because every
contributor in an opensource application has the "right" to decide whats
worth working on and that includes Digium. And by the same logic,
contributors who want to improve applications should be allowed, no?

Another option might be to move them to a separate package along the
lines of asterisk-addons.

-- 
John Lange
www.johnlange.ca


On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 17:37 -0500, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> 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.
>