[asterisk-dev] Asterisk 1.6 Realtime Database must use ', ' not '|' in appdata field?

[Dmitry Andrianov]

Why hotel chain would upgrade their Asterisk with no reason? For just bug fixes they can stay with the same release branch (just getting new point-releases) and no applications wil be discontinued. The truth is you HAVE to be prepared for troubles when switching from one major release to another for any software. This is not about just Asterisk - ask your IT guys how painful was Windows XP => Vista transition for example.

People are not perfect. They cannot design application FOO or API BAR ideally from the very beginning. Over the time you will find that something is missing, something what was good before is not very good now because technologies change etc. You can even find that the thing should be designed completely different way but it is too late. So what can you do? Either stick with the old implementation forever or add new one, and deprecate the old one to encourage people switch. Some day later you could decide to completely remove old application because hello, it is really old now and you cannot spend effort maintaining it too when there are another, recommended and better way of doing the same thing.


From: asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Ward Mundy
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 3:33 AM
To: asterisk-dev at lists.digium.com
Subject: [asterisk-dev] Asterisk 1.6 Realtime Database must use ', ' not '|' in appdata field?

I know I must be missing something (and I'm sure there are some folks chomping at the bit to tell me (again) what an idiot I am) but... what does the Asterisk project gain by continually deprecating commands and syntax. Having read this list for months, it's fairly apparent that the basic assumption of most of the developers is that everyone using Asterisk has a full-time person standing by to rewrite their dialplans and scripts every time a new version of Asterisk is released. That really is not the case in the real world. Consultants purchase, install, and design phone systems for large organizations to last a decade or more. Then they move on. Companies really don't want to have to rewrite their code every 12 to 18 months much less hire a new consultant to wade through someone else's code fixing stuff that was broken by the Asterisk developers trying to add a little more perfection to the puzzle. Does supporting | and , really cause that much heartburn?? It enhances nothing!

The real beauty of Asterisk has been the flexibility it offered companies and organizations to transparently bring their users AND their old hardware into a new, more flexible system. Why would you want to throw all of that away by continually breaking all of the application code that these organizations build to support their phone systems? Suppose a hotel chain invested hundreds of thousands of dollars building a hotel management system in Asterisk. Do you really think they want to rewrite that code every year?? I really don't get it.
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