[asterisk-dev] CentOS packaging

[Matthew Jordan]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Ben Langfeld <ben at langfeld.co.uk> wrote:
> After a conversation with Rusty last week, I've become aware that for a
> simple installation of asterisk (11) from the CentOS repositories at
> http://packages.asterisk.org/centos/, the 'current' repo at
> http://packages.digium.com/centos is required to satisfy the dependency of
> the 'asterisk' package on 'asterisk-dahdi'.

There is not an absolute technical requirement that installing
Asterisk requires you to install DAHDI as well. This is particularly
true of Asterisk 11 and later versions, where all dialplan application
dependencies on DAHDI were either removed or had appropriate
alternatives created.

If the packages were restructured, it could be set up so that Asterisk
only provides chan_dahdi in a subpackage - although there are
obviously some issues with subpackages as well. I'm still not sure of
a good structure for subpackages that lets you pick optional modules
in an 'ala carte' fashion. For example, I may want chan_dahdi, but I
may also want PostgreSQL for realtime, IMAP voicemail, and
chan_ooh323. (The answer is probably 'build from source', but the fact
that each subpackage has to be independent from others limits their
usefulness, in my opinion)

> I understand that there are licensing reasons for this package to not be
> available from the community repo, and I'm not going to get into the
> complexity of that, but this situation is rather odd. It's required to add a
> total of three repos, from two different domains, just to do 'yum install
> asterisk' and get something from this decade. This seems excessively
> complex, and likely unnecessary.
>
> Is there anything that can be done to simplify this? Is the dependency on
> asterisk-dahdi really necessary? Is there a reason not to publish the
> contents of the 'current' repo to all of the 'asterisk-MAJOR' repos, to
> reduce the required repo-count to 1?

So you are correct that there are licensing issues - of multiple
varieties - with having the DAHDI firmware packages be delivered from
packages.asterisk.org. I don't think, however, that there would be any
issue for Asterisk 11+ with segmenting chan_dahdi into a separate
subpackage. I think that would be a little tough for Asterisk 1.8,
however, as MeetMe still requires DAHDI for mixing.

-- 
Matthew Jordan
Digium, Inc. | Engineering Manager
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at: http://digium.com & http://asterisk.org