[asterisk-dev] [Asterisk 0017576]: [patch] Cannot join a queue when all members are paused and "joinempty=no".

[Dave Woolley]

The fix that has just been committed for this erroneously, in my view, treats paused the same as unavailable.

In my view, paused indicates a very temporary unavailability, where queueing would be always be reasonable, whereas unavailable represents a rather longer period, e.g. when an agent has logged off, and possibly gone home for the night.  "no" is already not useful for when agents can log off, but the change means that even "strict" is not useful, because it will dump callers that could be serviced.

A further complication is that the paused status is orthogonal to the device state.  You can definitely have paused and unavailable at the same time.  It is a long time since I looked at this area in detail, but, at the moment, I'm not 100% sure that invalid and paused is not also a valid combination.  A quick skim of the code shows no sign that paused + invalid is not a "valid" combination.

Whilst the change slightly improves the handling of paused if all your queue members are added dynamically, or you never pause an invalid member, it doesn't address the real problem, which is that paused should only really be considered when the member is available and there should be a way of rejecting calls when all agents are logged out, but accepting them when they are all logged in but paused.

We make heavy use of pausing, to control which calls actually reach an agent, and we found that none of the joinempty options worked well and this change will not make things better.  We resorted to using dialplan code to check the number of logged in agents. (Our bigger problem is that there isn't a way, in the versions of Asterisk we use, to cause a queue to be left when all agents logout, but not when they all pause.  There is in trunk, and it might be in 1.6.2.)

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David Woolley
BTS Holdings Plc
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