[asterisk-dev] [Code Review] 3343: res_pjsip: Enable DNS support.

[Matthew Jordan]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 9:02 AM, Olle E. Johansson <oej at edvina.net> wrote:
>
> It would mean continuing to maintain Asterisk's pjproject fork until those
> changes were (hopefully) accepted upstream, released, and then waiting for
> the rpm/deb packages to catch up.  Not to mention that someone would
> actually have to _do_ all of this work.  Could all volunteers please raise
> their hands? ;-)
>
>
> If this is how we are going to manage our product then I'm getting really
> worried. Are we controlling our own software?
>

Of course we are controlling our own software! The problem of "I need
something in this library, and adding it brings me out of step with
the upstream until they accept it" is certainly not new to Asterisk's
usage of PJSIP. It's the same problem every open source project has
faced when they depend on another open source project. And there is,
of course, an easy solution: write a patch to the open source project
you depend on, submit it upstream, and in the meantime deal with the
differences.

Is that a bit harder than embedding a library or writing the entire
library yourself? Of course. Does it mean that some changes that you
might make if you "owned the code" you instead choose not to make
because you have to submit it upstream? Sure. That's part of the cost
of depending on someone else's code. But the benefits of using a
library far outweigh the disadvantages: the fact that in a year or so
of time we were able to produce a functioning SIP channel driver with
95% of the features in chan_sip and additional features besides should
be proof enough of the benefit.

-- 
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