[asterisk-users] Asterisk on Debian Etch

[Stephen Bosch]

Diego Iastrubni wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 April 2007 16:24, Stephen Bosch wrote:
>> Well, I can't speak for anybody else, but I haven't had a problem with
>> reproducing a source install.
> How about time?
> 
> 2 minutes download+install, vs 10-20 minutes compilation.
> Then, how do you 
> uninstall? How do you know which version do you have? 

If you don't have 10-20 minutes for compilation you have no business
installing a PBX of any stripe, let alone Asterisk.

And if you don't know how to get the version number of your Asterisk
install... are you actually administering Asterisk installations for users?

If you're new to this, fine, it's okay to prefer packages and not know
how to determine the version number of your install -- but don't be
handing out dangerous advice that makes people unnecessarily afraid of
performing tasks vital to the successful administration of a piece of
software. This isn't difficult, and there's plenty of help available.

>> Can you tell I'm a Gentoo user? :P
<snip>
> And even gentoo uses packages. Sorry, but "make install" is something for 
> developers - not users.

Yes, and I've already acknowledged I use mostly packages. The
distinction with Gentoo is that the packages are source packages and are
built at install time.

Even so, for Asterisk, I *still* install from tarballs.

If by user you mean somebody using a phone, then touché -- I don't
expect my phone users to be doing 'make install' either.

But we're talking about administering Asterisk, here. Seriously -- if
you can't do a 'make install', then you should stay away from both
Asterisk *and* Linux. This is not rocket science. It's like flying a
plane on auto-pilot, or flying a plane without knowing how to taxi.
Being able to steer in flight is not good enough -- if you can't land
and take off, you have no business in the cockpit.

To say that 'make install' is something 'for developers - not users' is
beyond absurd.

My Linux servers started working the day I stopped wasting my time with
packages, idiotic package dependency chains and hardware
incompatibilities with binaries and learned how to install from sources.
And no, I'm not a developer (nor am I a rocket scientist, though I do
think rockets are cool).

> The good thing about package managers, is that they tell you which package has 
> been modified (a user changes a file, someone breaks into your machine and 
> modifies a binary). In rpm it's done via "rpm -qVa" and in debian it's done 
> by the command "debsums". I am not sure about gentoo.

Utilities from gentoolkit will do this in Gentoo.

> On a developers users - I would say install from source. On a *users* list : 
> install always from your distribution packages. When was the last time you 
> installed X from sources? KDE? Mozilla? OpenOffice? Why is asterisk 
> different?

Because X versions don't differ materially from minor version to minor
version; because X isn't updated nearly as often Asterisk; because
Asterisk, unlike X, doesn't take days to compile; because X, in general,
isn't used to provide many users with a vital service -- if your X
breaks, it's your tears, not the whole department's.

Look, this is not the local Quake III server we're talking about -- this
is phone service. The biggest mental hurdle that IT people have to get
over is that it is absolutely *not* okay when the phones break, for any
reason, for any period of time. This is a whole new world of user
expectation. The PSTN people already get what I'm talking about. (They
get too much undeserved shit from IT people who have no concept what a
feat it is to run a network with 99.999% uptime. Say what you will about
my local telco; I haven't lost a dialtone on my local phone in more than
5 years, and before that it had been 21. Respect the experienced PSTN
technician -- he is worthy of it.)

I'm sorry -- for Asterisk, I have to disagree with you categorically.
The depth of support available for someone who has installed from
original sources is deeper and the installation is guaranteed to be
current. Updating a source install is also trivial; and if somebody
needs help doing that, I'm happy to provide some advice in that
department (I've updated Asterisk on a production machine twice in the
last month, and it took less than 10 minutes both times -- the same
can't be said for my X, KDE or Mozilla installations).

-Stephen-