[asterisk-dev] Which enviroments are supported, really?

[Alexander Traud]

Recently, I was hit by a missing dependency of an external library (ASTERISK-27475). Because I was not able to resolve the issue otherwise, I re-visited the first-time experience of Asterisk, thinking that should solve my issue for sure.

wget downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-13-current.tar.gz
tar -zxf asterisk-*
cd asterisk-*
sudo ./contrib/scripts/install_prereq install
./configure --with-pjproject-bundled
make
sudo make install samples config
sudo asterisk -c

Those eight steps are the path for a novice user to get Asterisk going. Consequently, those steps have to succeed in a supported environment, without a single error and should not give warnings.

In OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Fedora - with the current release (Asterisk 13.19 or 15.2) - these steps lead into errors. Asterisk is not even built! Furthermore, external libraries are not found by the script configure, the wrong ones are installed, and (even essential) ones are missing. Make errors out, PJProject and Asterisk are not built. Even when all issues are fixed or circumvented, the command-line interface of Asterisk prints not only warnings but several errors in such a standard installation.

I contributed back many of my fixes to the current branches already. So the next releases should give a better out-of-the-box experience. However, all those issues could have been found by static testing, just executing the above commands on a virtual machine. Looking at the amount of issues, I asked myself whether I am doing something wrong. Especially as diagnosis revealed that some issues were 18 months old. Therefore: Which environments (platform, shell, and compiler) are really supported by the Asterisk team (has to work) and what is community contributed (should work)?

   shell: GNU bash
compiler: GCC
platform: CentOS 7

That is used by the continuous integration machine(s) and FreePBX currently. What else has to work? I do not earn a penny because of Asterisk. I do not want to waste time with a so lala supported environment. There must be a wiki entry, blog post, video, or mail summarizing the environments. For some reason, I was not able to find it, yet.