[asterisk-dev] AstriDevCon 2014: Agenda item Deprecate AMI/AGI(Ben Klang)

[BJ Weschke]

On 10/22/14, 12:14 PM, Paul Albrecht wrote:
> On Oct 22, 2014, at 10:33 AM, Joshua Colp <jcolp at digium.com> wrote:
>
>> Paul Albrecht wrote:
>>> Really? Shouldn’t something this major affecting the entire Asterisk
>>> community get discussed on the lists? Any idea what Leif is talking
>>> about when he says the community is in transition, moving from dial
>>> plan model to external control.
>> It was something Ben Klang brought up and wanted to talk about - it's
>> not something that has been decided 'nor does anyone know what the
>> future entails. Any further discussions will naturally occur on the
>> mailing list and in fact some things have explicit action items to bring
>> them up on here.
>>
> The suggestion that Asterisk should consider deprecating AMI/AGI is “crazy talk.” It doesn’t merit discussion and shouldn’t be on the agenda in the first place. It’s completely impractical and can never happen. Moreover, Leif seems to think we (the asterisk community) are in transition. What does that mean? Are we abandoning the dial plan? Seriously? That’s never gonna happen either. ARI isn’t easier to use than dial plan scripting. I guess one could hope that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, but I don’t think the Asterisk community has that kind of luck.
>
>

  "It doesn't merit discussions and shouldn't be on the agenda in the 
first place." Really?

  Paul, aside from the Digium team, everyone else that's there at DevCon 
have spent outside funds to get there and I think the consortium is 
pretty well able to discuss whatever they'd like regardless of your 
dictator like statements which goes against everything that an open 
sourced project/community is supposed to be.   There have been years 
where I'm able to attend DevCon and there have been other years, like 
this one,  where I'm not able to attend because of prior business 
commitments. In the prior years where I haven't been able to attend, I 
don't personally feel like anything major was implemented without first 
being vetted with the list and community at large. I'm not really sure 
why you perceive the whole AstriDevCon event to be some kind of 
conspiracy theory against the community at large, but knowing both Josh, 
Leif, and many other people in that room for some number of years now, I 
can assure you that I've never seen anything other than 100% transparency.

  You've made more than clear in prior posts to this forum that you're 
not really a fan of ARI. I think we all get it. There are other people 
that are fans and, for them, they're in transition to using it in a more 
mainstream fashion because it's able to do things for them that AMI and 
AGI cannot.  I personally still use AGI and AMI in many production 
scenarios with Asterisk today and I'm only just thinking lately about 
certain applications that I could transition to ARI. We cannot discount 
that there's a very large cost for the developers, testers, and the 
community at large to continue to keep AMI/AGI maintained and 
functionally up to date with all the Asterisk changes along with ARI 
given the way that AMI/AGI were originally implemented in the codebase. 
For people that are absolutely hooked on still using AMI/AGI in the 
longer term, perhaps a discussion could ensue at some point about a 
bridge with AMI/AGI functionality being built off of ARI itself, or 
maybe that's just crazy talk. I really don't know. The great thing about 
Asterisk and the community around it is that if there's enough 
participation and interest, anything can happen.

  BJ