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

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 09:00:53AM -0400, Ward Mundy wrote:
> > From: Sean Bright <sean.bright at gmail.com>
> >
> > Ward,
> > So what would you like to see happen with 1.6?  Based on what I have
> > read of this thread, the optimal scenario for you and your users is 100%
> > BC with Asterisk 1.4 (and possibly 1.2?).  Besides that, what else do
> > you envision for 1.6 and beyond?
> 
> 
> Glad you asked. Jared Smith and I already have had this discussion, and I
> know he has shared some of this with many of the folks inside Digium
> already. For the benefit of others, let me try to set out some of the issues
> that have been raised and propose a few solutions.
> 
> There are two main areas where code changes in Asterisk directly impact what
> I would call Asterisk applications. By Asterisk applications, I mean
> business applications, 

[snip]

> So... the two areas where code changes in Asterisk affect these systems are
> API changes and CLI/dialplan syntax changes. An example of an API change
> would be the ast_config_load function which, I am told, now requires that an
> additional parameter be passed. 

What was this change? When? What was the rationale for doing it?

Arguing that something is bad because "I was told so" makes it pretty
difficult for anybody to give you sensible answers. 

> This broke most of the text-to-speech
> interfaces to Asterisk, specifically Flite and Cepstral. Cepstral got fixed
> pretty quickly. It's commercial software. Flite probably never will be fixed
> because the original developer is long gone. 

What prevents you from fixing it? Or paying someone to fix it?

Generally if some software is left unchanged for two years, with not
even bug fixes, I start suspecting noone uses it. 

For isntance: where can I find the latest versions of:

  astproxyman
  phpagi (homepage lists latest version as released on 2005)

A case to the other way:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/agx-ast-addons

> How could this have been
> avoided? Pretty simple really. Create a new function with the additional
> parameter instead of breaking code that depended on the old one. And, no, it
> wouldn't have to be named ast_config_load2 or ast_config_load99. And, no, it
> wouldn't mean supporting 100,000 functions down the road.

We would all appreciat suggestions on how to better do changes. Again,
please be more specific.

> 
> An example of the CLI/dialplan syntax change would be this thread, i.e.
> making an AGI function call now requires that parameters be separated by
> commas instead of vertical bars. More egregious were the changes in CallerID
> syntax between Asterisk 1.2 and Asterisk 1.4 which broke almost everyone's
> dialplans. 

SetCallerID et. al. were declared deprecated in the 1.2 cycle. If you
wrote a new dialplan in Asterisk 1.2 and used them, you really
misbehaved and it's quite difficult blamind the Asterisk developers for
that. They asked you explicitly not to.

> There are two different ways to address these changes. The first
> would be to support the alternate syntax in the code for a much longer
> period of time, e.g. 10 years instead of 1-2 years. I would note that I
> still have DOS database applications I wrote in 1985 that run perfectly well
> under Windows Vista. A second alternative would be to create a middleware
> application that translates the old syntax into the new one. For most of the
> dialplan carnage, this would have been relatively easy, e.g. the CallerID
> stuff, the timeout functions, and changing |'s to commas.

(I have quite a few DOS games that badly react to higher clock speeds,
and are thus unusable. Many other DOS programs that access the hardware
directly in strange ways and thus fail in most emulated environments suc
as Windows NT and DosEMU.

Analogies are nice, but are not always relevant. Please stick to the
point.

I assume you read:

http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-dev/2008-May/thread.html#32889

I suggest making specific comments to that thread.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
icq#16849755              jabber:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
+972-50-7952406           mailto:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
http://www.xorcom.com  iax:guest at local.xorcom.com/tzafrir