[asterisk-dev] How to split Asterisk packages

[Jonathan Thurman]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Alan Jones <skyphyr at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyway - the headers would go in a -devel package, the pdf in a -doc package,
> sounds would be split by language, codec, and I guess core and extra (though
> how do I tell them apart once it's in the final directory structure?).

I am not familiar with the build setup for Pardus, but for RPM based
builds I create different configuration files and builds for the sound
packages.  That way you know that the sound files belong in extras
because your build tree only has the sounds-extra for that language in
it.

> Also are the
> empty .asterisk*sounds* files required? Any others I should delete?

Looking at the way Digium packages sound files, the .asterisk-*sounds*
files are included.  Any README / CHANGES should be put into the docs
directory IMHO.

> Then when it gets to modules etc I get extra unsure what should be done. Is it
> worth spitting these apart?

Personally, I split things out into a lot of packages for many
reasons.  Save disk space, less to download, less to patch, less to
break (unless you don't get dependencies right...), and less loaded at
run time (if you have autoload = yes).  Disk space might seem silly,
but if you add for example ODBC support, then you need to make sure
that all of the libraries are installed and updated for ODBC as well
as the module file for Asterisk.

An ODBC sub-package would contain all of the odbc modules (res_odbc,
res_config_odbc, cdr_odbc, cel_odbc, etc), LDAP is another one that
would be the done the same.


> i.e. I have the dahi kernel modules and dahdi-tools
> in other packages as their source is separate. Should the dahdi dependent
> asterisk config and modules be split out? Then there's all the other ones and
> where it starts/ends becomes especially unclear to me.

The configurations for the modules should be kept with the package
that contains the module.  No sense in having a configuration file for
chan_mgcp if you are never going to use it.  I also would encourage
you to put the sample configurations it the Documentation section for
the package.  Having them installed into /etc/asterisk (or where ever)
has proven to be a little dangerous to me.  The only exception that I
make to that would be asterisk.conf, as it is pretty safe if it gets
replaced on accident (but you don't want an extensions.conf file to
change on an update by mistake!)


> Sorry for that getting a little ramblingish. It's a fairly complicated system.
> Anyway - what would you all consider to be your ideal setup for splitting and
> dependencies?

One source that I have used is the SPEC files for RPM builds that are
maintained by Digium.  I see that your distribution doesn't use RPM,
but with a little reading you can see how others are splitting the
packages and dealing with dependencies.  The SPEC files are directly
published, but available from the source RPMS found here:

http://packages.asterisk.org/centos/5/current/SRPMS/

You can google extracting rpms so you don't have to have a system
capable of installing the SRPM to get the .spec file out.  They should
give you some idea of how modules have been split out.  Hope that gets
you in the right direction.  Good luck!

-Jonathan