[asterisk-gui] Improving Debugging

[Ryan Brindley]

Hey Community, 
Recently I've been working more and more with community members on issues they're having. Through-out this process, I've been trying to consider the best approach to debugging issues and then sharing that information. There seems to be no standard methodology, besides simply reporting the symptoms and waiting for a response. So I'm interested to hear what some ideas would be to solving the tedious process we're facing in debugging. 

To start the discussion off, I'll express my initial thought. This would be to improve the debug mode in the GUI in a few key aspects. First off, properly report failed conditions in code. This is done in some areas, but not all (Side note: this would be a great side project for community members wanting to learn the GUI). The second thing I thought about would be a 'make bug report' feature that gather specific information related to the system and the failed condition. Some of this information would be the general GUI version and Asterisk version, but in certain cases we could possibly do info such as: what the GUI received from Asterisk, a section in the GUI's cache of a config file, the GUI error msg, etc etc. 

To help clarify here are some common issues in debugging that we currently face: 
(1) we need an easy way to show Asterisk's related config , especially in cases where editions span multiple config files (typically users.conf and extensions.conf) 
(2) we need an easy way to report the GUI error 
(3) we need an easy way to report any Asterisk errors 
(4) optimally we need to determine if this is a config issue or a bug. A config issue being improper input from the user; and a bug being proper input from a user being improperly handled. 
(5) it'd also be nice to know if this is an issue in Asterisk or the GUI code, but that would most likely require human evaluation. 

-- 
Ryan Brindley 
Digium, Inc. | Software Developer 
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA 
main: +1 256-428-6000 fax: +1 256-864-0464 
Check us out at: http://digium.com & http://asterisk.org 
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