[asterisk-dev] Why is "core show channels concise" deprecated?

[Mark Michelson]

On 01/24/2012 04:59 PM, Bryant Zimmerman wrote:
> Danny Nicholas pointed out to me the info below about the concise 
> option be deprecated. My question is if it is going to pulled long 
> term why is the verbose option truncating the information. They 
> both have a different purpose the verbose option is not useful as it 
> does not return the full data. This would kill all of our outside 
> channel monitoring code that uses the asterisk -rx "core show channels 
> concise". What is the thinking behind this move.
>
> From cli.c (asterisk 10)
>             e->command = "core show channels [concise|verbose|count]";
>                 e->usage =
>                         "Usage: core show channels 
> [concise|verbose|count]\n"
>                         "       Lists currently defined channels and 
> some information about them. If\n"
>                         "       'concise' is specified, the format is 
> abridged and in a more easily\n"
>                         "       machine parsable format. If 'verbose' 
> is specified, the output includes\n"
>                         "       more and longer fields. If 'count' is 
> specified only the channel and call\n"
>                         "       count is output.\n"
>                         "       The 'concise' option is deprecated and 
> will be removed from future versions\n"
>                         "       of Asterisk.\n";
>                 return NULL;
>
> Thanks
>
> Bryant
>
The thinking is that CLI commands are intended for human consumption, 
not for parsing by code. This frees us to be able to make changes to CLI 
commands when they have typos, are formatted badly, or are missing 
information without the worry that it will mess up somebody's parsing code.

The "core show channels verbose" command was written before this 
thinking came into play. The preferred method for handling this sort of 
task is via the Asterisk Manager Interface's CoreShowChannels command 
instead.

One thing that also should be mentioned is that we also operate under 
the philosophy (since about 1.6.0 or thereabouts) that even when 
something becomes deprecated, we won't remove it. People like to have 
stress-free upgrades if at all possible, and so if it doesn't actually 
hurt to leave the code in, then we'll leave it in. However, don't expect 
quick turnaround if you report a bug in something that is declared 
deprecated, and don't expect any updates to happen to deprecated code 
either.

Mark Michelson
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