[asterisk-dev] DAHDI and Asterisk

[Joshua C. Colp]

On Thu, May 18, 2023 at 12:05 PM <asterisk at phreaknet.org> wrote:

> Wanted to float a question here for the Asterisk core team, that has
> been discussed amongst several other Asterisk/DAHDI developers a bit.
>
> As we all know, the DAHDI project has been neglected the past few years
> and it does not appear that there is any team at Sangoma that is
> actively working on it or cares about it. Sangoma has repeatedly failed
> to take responsibility for DAHDI and is not letting the community
> maintain it either, i.e. PRs are not being merged, build failures are
> not addressed. Numerous developers, myself included, have long been
> maintaining external patch sets[1] or forks[2] to address this.
>
> At this point, it is unrealistic to expect the DAHDI project in its
> current form to ever really get back on track. Some distros I'm told
> have already abandoned Sangoma and now use the osmocom fork as their
> upstream for packages. Most people have been using these methods to
> build DAHDI, rather than using the Sangoma tarballs.
>
> Merely maintaining patch sets or forks is not a long term solution. Many
> new Asterisk features require DAHDI changes, and thus require patches to
> be maintained for multiple projects. Even if the Asterisk side could be
> merged in fine, some changes may require or depend on a DAHDI change to
> work properly. Over time, patches begin to conflict with or step on each
> other. DAHDI does not live in a bubble and has impacts that ripple out
> to other things, like Asterisk.
>
> Since DAHDI has no active maintainer currently, I wanted to float a
> couple ideas here to remedy the situation, in order of feasibility (I
> think):
>
>  1. Would it be possible for the DAHDI project to be moved to fall under
>     the scope of the Asterisk project? e.g. similar to libpri. The
>     Asterisk team would not need to actively do anything with it, but
>     just merge changes into it as it does for libpri, for example (kind
>     of like extended support). I think this would make the most sense
>     because fundamentally, DAHDI is part of the Asterisk ecosystem.
>     Asterisk has a dependence on DAHDI and so bringing that dependency
>     in house makes sense since it eliminates friction. For example, this
>     change[3] stalled solely because nobody is merging PRs into DAHDI.
>     If the Asterisk team was able to merge DAHDI changes, problem
>     solved, and then Asterisk changes aren't stalled because DAHDI is
>     stalled.
>

No. This is not something that the Asterisk project or Asterisk team will
take on. We're trying to reduce the amount of responsibilities (such as
reducing the amount of infrastructure we maintain and manage) we have to be
able to focus on Asterisk itself, taking on new ones particularly in areas
we have no expertise in is not something we will be doing.

I am aware that such an email has been sent to parties inside of Sangoma,
and have given my opinion to them on the situation. I'm not in a position
to provide any further insight into that or decide for them. Any decisions
has to come from them.

-- 
Joshua C. Colp
Asterisk Project Lead
Sangoma Technologies
Check us out at www.sangoma.com and www.asterisk.org
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