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

[Jamuel Starkey]

+1
-----Original Message-----
From: Bryant Zimmerman [BryantZ at zktech.com]
Received: Tuesday, 24 Jan 2012, 3:45pm
To: Asterisk Developers Mailing List [asterisk-dev at lists.digium.com]
Subject: Re: [asterisk-dev] Why is "core show channels concise" deprecated?

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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