[asterisk-users] Asterisk 1.8.11.0 Debian Squeeze packages with T.38 gateway, queue hints and fixed RFC4235 (notifycid=yes)

[Kevin P. Fleming]

On 04/18/2012 06:08 AM, Niccolò Belli wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Il 18/04/2012 00:39, Kevin P. Fleming ha scritto:
>> You guys know that it works in Asterisk 10, but you say you can't use
>> Asterisk 10 for some reason that I don't understand.
>
> 1) No Debian packages for v10. If you have to maintain lots of servers,
> installing from sources is a big burden. Compile, install and forget
> isn't the way I work: if I have to apply a fix or close a security hole
> I can easily push the patches to my build server which will recompile
> all the branches I maintain, then every server will automatically
> upgrade with cron jobs.

This is a valid point, and we'll get this corrected. Our package 
repository should have packages for Asterisk 10, but it doesn't.

> 2) A new whole of problems when upgrading production machines from a
> working 1.8.x to v10. That will mean parsing configs manually, find the
> problems and fixing them.

I haven't seen any rash of problems with config files when users upgrade 
from 1.8 to 10; in fact, we've changed development policies specifically 
in order to avoid breaking existing working configurations during 
upgrades, except when they are unavoidable.

> 3) Third parties utilities/hardware/modules. I'm still waiting for a fix
> for my Sangoma BRI card which did broke when upgrading... You need a
> compatible version of third parties components to use recent versions of
> asterisk/dahdi/whatever and upgrading third parties components does
> always mean problems.

Do you expect Debian-style packages to include these third-party 
components in Asterisk? If you are talking about DAHDI specifically, 
moving to Asterisk 10 does not change DAHDI requirements at all.

> 4) Isn't v10 supposed to be
> "beta"/non-production/non-long-term-support?[1] If we want to honor what
> Digium says we should use 1.8 for production servers when reliability is
> important. Backporting a single "unstable" feature is much better than
> the whole thing.

Asterisk 10 is not 'beta' or 'non-production', I have no idea where you 
are getting such an idea. Yes, it is a 'standard', not 'long term 
support' release, but it is still fully supported and intended for 
production use (it is not a 'developer' release). If you want Digium to 
be able to support your installation, especially for a long term, adding 
in a series of complex patches that significantly change behavior will 
not lead to a supportable system; if you report an issue against your 
patched version of Asterisk, the first response will be to replicate the 
problem without the patches in place, which defeats the purpose of using 
a 'supported' release.

>
> 5) What was the purpose of the t38gateway-1.8 branch? Why did it existed
> at all if not to allow users to use t38 gw in production servers? I even
> read about the possibility to backport t38 gw to 1.8 as a plugin, but it
> seems it isn't a requested feature (which is strange because I know
> peoples who stopped using asterisk because of the lack of t38 gw).

You'd have to ask the community developer who created the branch what 
his intentions were with it; it's not an 'official' release of Asterisk, 
and at this point it isn't supported by anyone. The T.38 gateway code 
was significantly reworked to get it merged into trunk (which became 
Asterisk 10), because the 1.8 version had a lot of serious issues. That 
code is most definitely *not* ready for production, especially given how 
difficult T.38 interoperability is in general. T.38 gateway support 
isn't available as a 'plugin' for older releases because those releases 
don't have the necessary APIs and functionality needed to make it work. 
Adding those into an older release would risk destabilizing that 
release, and would dramatically increase the testing and support burden.

> I really don't want to do polemics: I always used pstn for the faxes
> until now and I will keep using it. No problem.

If you feel that having a discussion about what makes sense for users to 
do and not to do is 'polemics', then fine, you can do whatever you like. 
Just please stop trying to assign blame or fault to people because this 
old, unsupported branch doesn't do what you want, especially when there 
is a current, fully supported release that will do what you want.

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
Jabber: kfleming at digium.com | SIP: kpfleming at digium.com | Skype: kpfleming
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org