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

[Bryant Zimmerman]

----------------------------------------
 From: "Mark Michelson" <mmichelson at digium.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2012 6:10 PM
To: asterisk-dev at lists.digium.com
Subject: Re: [asterisk-dev] Why is "core show channels concise" 
deprecated?

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

Mark

Thank you for your reply. I see the point about the Asterisk Manager but I 
have had it lock up over the years and don't fully trust it for our core 
monitoring functions.  As for looking at the verbose option as human 
usable.  By not showing the user the full channel info what use is it as it 
can not be used for anthing. Say a channel has hung and a request needs to 
be entered to hang it up. The verbose option does not show the full channel 
ID  it is chopped off so you would be stuck and could not get the full id 
if the concise were not there. This is also an issue when you do a sip show 
peers as info is being chopped of. You get a pretty list of data but the 
data is not usable to it's fullest.  We are building more of our tools 
using the manager but it is nice to have the full info from the cli if 
needed.

Thanks Again.

Bryant

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