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

[Steve Murphy]

On Thu, 2008-05-29 at 19:48 -0400, RE Kushner List Account wrote:
> Ward Mundy wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Hear, Hear!!
> 
> Then the Digium minions bitch and moan nobody uses 1.4 on the users 
> list. They don't understand how hard Asterisk is to upgrade, you 
> actually have to migrate to a new server and do a cut over, then spend 
> months chasing down broken stuff in the dialplan. And if you skip from 
> 1.2 to 1.6 you'll find some really nasty broken stuff in the dialplan 
> and bewildering CLI changes.
> 
> -Ron
> 

Ron & Ward--

I guess I'm just as guilty as any other "Digium Minion" at changing
things between versions, and I plead for mercy. I have my own office
phone system at home, and I hate upgrading it as much as you do your
stuff.

But writing converters is a fairly big effort also, and we as
developers, er, "Digium Minions" I meant to say, are constrained to
spending 75% of our efforts on bug fixing as opposed to new
enhancements. 

We don't sit around plotting on how we can make life more difficult for
users. Usually, the changes you hate so much are necessary in order to
do what needs to be done, to solve major problems, or to provide some
new really cool capability. We'd love to be omniscient, and do it right
the first time, but sometimes you just don't/can't know the right way,
until you've taken a first stab at an implementation, and played around
with it. The second and third rounds are usually much better.

Writing converters is a fairly big effort, and we as developers, er,
"Digium Minions" I meant to say, are constrained to spending 75% of our
efforts on bug fixing as opposed to new enhancements. I personally am
able to write such converters, as most, if not all Digium developers
are, but my quota of non-bug work is pretty much used up for the rest of
the year, personally. But, it's open source, and we welcome any
contributions from the community. I *did* write an external config file
interface, see utils/extconf.c, which should make such code much easier
to write. The interface will parse config files into data structures,
and given data structures, can also write a config file. Traversal funcs
are also provided. So all you have to do is make mods, etc, and write a
new converted file. I think it would be neat, and if anyone is willing
to write this kind of code, I will be willing to provide advise, some
assistance, a shoulder to cry on, and a ton of atta-boys. I'm sure
Muffins would also be in order!

murf



-- 
Steve Murphy
Software Developer
Digium
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