[asterisk-dev] Zaptel project being renamed to DAHDI

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Tuesday 20 May 2008 17:08:25 John Lange wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 17:57 -0400, Dean Collins wrote:
> > Basically Sangnoma cards will now have to be DAHDI compliant (which
> > kind of sucks).
>
> Or, Sangoma could write their own drivers, make them GPL compatible and
> put them in the kernel.
>
> It would be great to finally break the tie between specific versions of
> Asterisk->Zaptel->Kernel so easier packaging could take place.

That is unlikely to happen.  The main reason why the move towards
integration with the kernel was rejected was a practical one:  given the
length of kernel release cycles and the speed at which new hardware needs
new modules to be created (obviously, the card needs a driver before it is
useful), it's rather impractical to get some of your hardware support from the
kernel and some hardware support from a temporary add-on.  And then there's
the question of when the temporary add-on is necessary and when it's out of
date.  Along with the kernel API changes made in each minor release, it's
simply easier for us (and really, for our customers) to maintain an outside
tree.

To support new features that require changes in kernel modules, we'd need
to align Asterisk release schedules with kernel release schedules.  When you
consider that even then, each distribution has its own timetable for
supporting new kernel releases, you're looking at a great complexity that we'd
need to keep up with, checking for kernel module versions to see what features
we can support (and I'm sure that RedHat will manage to backport certain
features without changing the module version, as they often do with kernels).
Again, it's just easier to maintain an outside tree.

-- 
Tilghman