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

[Sherwood McGowan]

Steve Murphy wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>   
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Murf (Er, 'Digium Minion #65738, I meant to say)
I'm actually interested to learn more about this external configuration 
file convertor thingamawhatsit, and will check out utils/extconf.c today :)

Moreover, before anyone flames you, let me be the first to say that you 
most probably _aren't_ any of the things that will be accused, including 
a Digium Minion. You've been helpful and open to my thoughts on changes 
to AEL2 over the past few years, including the write function for 
dumping the converted dialplan (by the way, GREAT for spotting strange 
"compiling" of the AEL code), the Gosub/Macro bug fix, and multiline 
commenting... Keep up the great work.

Ok, I'm done, let me wipe off my nose ;-)