[asterisk-dev] Asterisk 1.6 Realtime Database must use ', ' not '|'

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Friday 23 May 2008 09:34:54 Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 08:13:16AM -0500, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> > On Friday 23 May 2008 07:38:10 Ward Mundy wrote:
> > > This is another example of how something that may appear to developers
> > > to be trivial has enormous negative consequences to those actually
> > > using Asterisk to do 'real work.' This one change breaks dialplan code
> > > for every AGI function call. For organizations with elaborate custom
> > > dialplans, this is expensive to fix particularly if some outside
> > > company (that's no longer around) wrote their dialplans. What is so
> > > difficult about supporting BOTH the comma and vertical bar as
> > > delimiters? The argument always has been that some of these changes
> > > were necessary to improve the performance of Asterisk. Not sure that
> > > holds water this time around.
> >
> > Why don't you suggest a patch, and we'll look at it the same way we look
> > at any other patch -- on its merits?
>
> I'm not sure that's a valid response.

The fact is that we made a change that will make adopting Asterisk easier in
the future, at a possible cost of pissing off a vocal minority of existing
users.  Yes, a vocal minority:  I have gotten plenty of comments from people
in private who found switching to 1.6 to be very easy, with minimal pain, but
many times, they will not speak up in public, because of the way that certain
minority treats the developers (if they treat the talented people this way,
why should they expect respect from that minority?)  Any change is going to
piss out a few users; if I was going for pissing off no users, at the expense
of losing new users who find the syntax arcane and difficult to master, we'd
make no changes at all.  I'm sorry, but we make advancements all the time in
the name of making Asterisk easier to use, and we're better off for it.

This is an open source ecosystem.  If you have a problem with one of these
advancements, then it's incumbent upon you to point it out, and, if the change
is seen to be justified by the developers, then you can either propose
alternate code or accept what was changed.  Remember, meritocracy, not
democracy.  The quality of the code that you contribute is what has the vote,
not how big of a bully pulpit you can manage.

> Digium, presumably, was responsible for the patch which changed the
> behaviour.  So if lots of users are coming back and saying "your patch
> breaks my investment of work", it seems incumbent on you to justify why
> it went in, rather than incumbent on the users to figure out how to
> back it out.

I hear from more users who are happy with the changes than are opposed
to the changes.  Even if this were a democracy instead of a meritocracy
(which it isn't), that still doesn't point to us needing to make a change.

> We've got almost 3000 lines of dialplan here (running on 18
> machines)... though this particular issue won't hit us immediately,
> since (unless there's flash news I missed) 1.4 won't even run VICIdial
> reliably yet, much less 1.6.  :-)

Yes, but we don't support third party apps.  If you have a problem with a
third party app, you need to talk to that third party developer.

-- 
Tilghman