[asterisk-doc] Looking to help contribute to the documentation...

[Philip A. Prindeville]

Hi.

I work quite a bit with Asterisk as the lead developer of astlinux
(http://www.astlinux.org/).  That said, I'm a programmer not a telephony
troubleshooter, but I can program and I can write so I figured I could
contribute a few things.

I noticed that some of the documentation is a little thin/sparse, and in
a few cases hasn't been updated since 1.2.

I wanted to take a few of the examples of things--such as e.164
look-aside dialing or SLA--and update those, enhance the examples, and
get them back into the source tree.

It's been said that the sample configs are getting a bit long and hard
to follow...  That's true.  So I've been thinking that we could fragment
them, and then instruct people how to use 'include' directives to pull
in the features they find useful (kind of like how sendmail.mc uses the
FEATURE() .cf files).

I also found that certain functionality is counter-intuitive, and might
need to be documented better (like the SIP stuff).

I'd also suggest the following.  When the Starfish book was published 5
years ago, there were a lot fewer VoIP providers out there, so people
did analog or ISDN trunking and used SIP or skinny "in-house" only. 
That's changed.  Now a lot of companies (and some residences) get their
connectivity via VoIP trunking.

If someone would like to add a new dialplan feature but they need some
programming done to make that happen, then let's talk about it.  I wrote
an app, for instance (WaitUntil... app_waituntil) that allowed
synchronizing to an exact time, from which I was able to write a 'time'
extension:

https://issues.asterisk.org/view.php?id=11487

https://issues.asterisk.org/view.php?id=16090

So, things that interest me that I'd like to see get done?  Here are a
couple off the top of my head:

* Update and modularize examples

* Add new examples, such as ISN and e.164 dialing

* Dialplan based find-me/follow-me

* Simple call filtering

* Simple time-of-day routing (e.g. having your teenagers' phones ring to
voice mail after 10pm on school nights)

* More troubleshooting extensions (read back IP address of caller,
statistics on jitter, etc.)

* Unlocking the power of SIPAddHeader() from the dialplan...

but I'm open to suggestions.

Anyway, if you're a configuration guru, please contact me.  I'm happy to
work with someone to get some rock-solid examples going and then get
them committed to the source tree for distribution.  They can help with
the technical parts (the troubleshooting) and I'll deal with the rest
(driving bugs, etc).

Thanks,

-Philip