[asterisk-users] weird undocumented extensions such as s-BUSY

[Barzilai Spinak]

Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 January 2007 1:16 pm, Barzilai Spinak wrote:
>   
>> So, in sum. It's just an Asterisk "idiom" or "best(?) practice" that has
>> become somewhat common.
>> Every time I need to do the smallest thing in Asterisk I have to Google
>> for 3 hours and read voip-info for the more hours, and then read old
>> mailing list post for 3 more, until I can filter out *real information*
>> from the background noise.
>>
>> Maybe it's just me... I don't settle with the first solution that
>> "SeemsToWorkForNow, even though I have no idea Why or How"
>>
>> Ah... the wonders of Early 21st Century Web Fashion and documenting
>> everything in big lumps of Little-Ultra-Hyper-Linked-Wiki-pages with
>> contradictory and obsolete info!!!!  Hopefully it will end some day and
>> the world will come back to its senses.
>>     
>
> After you're done hyperventilating, feel free to contribute documentation 
> which you find is meaningful, current and insightful.
>   
Too much heat here to be hyperventilating :-)

> Open-source in general is very much a "get your hands dirty" kind of software 
> experience.  This means that you are expected to play around, experiment, and 
> ask good questions, ALL without throwing a little tantrum as you just did.
>   
I have been getting my hands dirty for years with many kinds of OSS.
What I was trying to experess by my hyperventilation is that:
a) There has been a trend in the past 2-4 years of thinking that Wikiing 
mounts and mounts and mounts of hyperventilated (err.. linked) "recipes" 
and general babbling amounts to "documentation".

b) The Asterisk project in particular is worst than most OSS I've seen 
in this respect. Maybe "aided" by the fact that most people producing 
said "documentation" seem to be of the not-so technical kind and just 
are eager to make a quick buck by selling cheap long distance calls, so 
at best they just rehash someone else's recipe with a comment along the 
lines of "this worked for me!".  All this on an OSS project which has a 
multi-million dollar company behind it...
I'm not complaining, I'm just hyperventilating some frustrations.

> If you want current manuals, completely stable software and someone to yell at 
> when your system breaks, Digium offers that, too.  It's called Asterisk 
> Business Edition.
I don't want the impossible "current manuals" as much as a current and 
comprehensive documentation of the architecture without all the noise 
from obsoleted/deprecated entities and contradictions from one wiki page 
to the next one touching a related concept.

> Otherwise, dig in, experiment and try to leave the place a little cleaner than you left it..
>   

Cleaning... I should start with my own office.... :-)
Believe me,. I've tried many times to comb through all voip-info.org and 
compiling something sensible for myself.... as many times I've abandoned 
the effort out of frustration... I don't even know where to start!
It's not a matter of cleaning up, but a matter of doing it cleanly the 
first time.  I'll keep trying though and then i'll contribute it

ok.. it's finally raining now!!!
done hyperventilating

BarZ