[asterisk-doc] New portal for Asterisk: The Future of Telephony (online HTML)

[Gavin Henry]

2009/3/19 Leif Madsen <leif.madsen at asteriskdocs.org>:
> Gavin Henry wrote:
>> It's always a hard and fast moving target to address. I wish you luck.
>> Will this list and a wiki be used for general review?
>
> We'll probably just use this list for the general review. This time around we're
> hoping that the snapshots will allow for better transparency as we write the
> book, and allow more review throughout the writing process as opposed to trying
> to review a whole book in a period of 2 weeks.

Ok. sounds good.

> I don't think we'll use a wiki as the book will be written in DocBook. The
> snapshots will most likely be done either after a major rework of a section, or
> when we complete a milestone (like completion of a chapter). This way we can
> point people to the section that changed, and all who are interested can focus
> on that part specifically.

Ok. I'm very familiar with DocBook anyway. A bit of background, if interested:

I learned DocBook back in 2003 when doing docs for Fedora. I then joined the
Fedora Documentation Steering Committee, whilst also helping Stephan do
the Amanda doc conversion to DocBook:

http://us3.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/ch-ldap-tls.html

I'm now part of the OpenLDAP project as docs lead, fitting in what I
can and last
year my proposal was approved by O'Reilly do an OpenLDAP Cookbook. I
haven't had chance
to bring that one to life yet though.

Anyway, I'm not blowing my own trumpet here, just pointing out that I
put my money where
my mouth is (see testing thread) and contribute when/where I can.

If you need help and reviewing etc. I'll help.

Oh, I forgot. The Fedora doc team now have a wiki->docbook converter.
Might be worth checking it
out if of interest:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/Writing_Using_The_Wiki

I can't remember how far they are, but it's probably not O'Reilly DocBook.

>>> We do talk about this a bit, and we'll probably do a bit more of it.
>>> That's certainly an interesting topic.
>>
>> Yeah. I'm sick of hearing * can only do 200 concurrent calls. Baaa....
>
> Agreed! We briefly cover the benchmarking thing as you mentioned, but if we can
> get a test environment setup and load test Asterisk 1.2, 1.4, and 1.6.x to show
> the advanced made between the various versions, I think that will give us enough
> data for a nice graph :)

Cool. No cheating though. Chuck in some transcoding!

>>>> Advanced:
>>>>
>>>> 1. An Advanced edition may cover something about OpenSIPS or Kamailio
>>>> and other sip proxies using Asterisk.
>>>>
>>> This is something to give some serious thought to, but the simple fact
>>> is that all those SER-based projects are pretty complicated, and our
>>> book (as with any book) needs to be true to it's subject. I think what
>>> you might find us doing is giving a more thorough treatment of the SIP
>>> protocol itself, but we'll see what time (and skill allow). It's a good
>>> suggestion, though.
>>
>> I appreciate that too. Now IAX2 is a proper RFC, I'd like to see both SIP and
>> IAX2 get more details. But again, it's a trade off. Beginner book or
>> Advanced. Don't
>> want to scare people and set the barrier too high.
>
> One of the sections I want to expand upon is configurations and topology
> scenarios to show "real life" scenarios that people often experience and have
> issues with. If we can reproduce those topologies, then we should be able to
> show how to configure them.

Cool.

>>>> 2. Linking different PBXs together.
>>>>
>>> Yep. Good idea and one we've got on the planned outline.
>>
>> Nice. Lot's of things can be done, but maybe just two are needed:
>>
>> 1. Connection/extending a system over some form of VoIP, H.323, SIP
>> etc. I'm thinking
>> about Avaya here.
>
> While H.323 is not very popular in North America (or Europe?), I think it is
> still popular in countries of the former Soviet Union, and the like, so I think
> covering this, at least in a basic, "this is how you get H.323 compiled and
> configured" would be useful, but we'll be focusing mostly on SIP, and to a
> lesser extent on IAX2, and H.323 lesser still.

Yeah, I just meant that that was all that was available on the Avaya
system (wow, three
thats in a sentence!).

>> 2. Connection/extending a system over PRI/BRI/analogue etc.
>
> I agree here. And there is a lot more hardware available now, and is a lot more
> robust, so I think covering this kind of stuff in more detail would be a welcome
> addition to the book.

Excellent!

> Thanks for the feedback!
>
> Leif Madsen.
>

No problem.

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