[Asterisk-Dev] TCL for configuration?

[Reed Wade]

At 12:04 AM 6/23/2003 -0500, Steven Critchfield wrote:
>On Sun, 2003-06-22 at 22:27, Reed Wade wrote:
> > Call me crazy but does anyone else think TCL scripts might provide a 
> cleaner
> > configuration mechanism than the existing config file format?
> >
> > I haven't been around Asterisk enough to say but it looks to me
> > like the config format was devised before something like TCL
> > would have been needed--but it's now grown such that a cleaner
> > mechanism to provide variables and expressions would be pretty useful.
>
>Why should you script somthing that is mostly lookup???



A more intuitive variable and expression evaluation syntax would
make the config easier to maintain.

True looping constructs could solve a lot of what has to be done
with macro expansion now.

One option would be to use TCL only to represent a static config.
The script would be evaluated at start up and reload.

An additional option could be to allow TCL procedures to register
themselves as Asterisk apps.




> >From what I know, the current configs where developed as a easy way of
>getting the data up from a file and into a C memory structure. From the
>code itself the speed of looking up the extension logic must be kept
>FAST.
>
>Just would like you to think your idea through a bit more and see if you
>could see the way to making at least as feature rich a setup.


There shouldn't be a loss of features or performance. The TCL
script would cause to be created the same fast running data
structures in use now.

It should even be mostly possible to take an existing (non TCL aware)
Asterisk config file and have it parsed by the TCL interpreter.
"exten" would become a command, ";" could replace "#" as the comment
indicator, "[" at the start of a line could be given unusual meaning
(not desirable, but doable).

Variable assignment ("set a 23" instead of "a=23") will be annoying or
required special coding.

So, backwards compatibility would probably be necessary and could
be done but you'd want to step away from it as soon as possible.

Aside from simpler and freer config files, it looks like a lot of parsing
code could be dropped from the Asterisk core and from individual applications
like voicemail. This is bound to make it simpler to manage the code base
going forward.

I won't claim I'm completely convinced but it does feel right.

-reed



>--
>Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>
>
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