[asterisk-dev] Dial2 or better named... was Re: ast_flags now uint64_t ? should it be reverted ?

[Steven Critchfield]

On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 09:27 -0600, Steve Murphy wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 09:45 -0500, Steven Critchfield wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 13:11 +0200, Olle E Johansson wrote:
> > > I have been thinking about implementing "dial by profile" for a while...
> > > 
> > > Imagine having a configuration file where you define a couple of dial  
> > > "patterns",
> > > in an easy-to-read way. Like
> > > 
> > > 
> > > [normal-call]
> > > timeout=20
> > > macro=dial-check
> > > answer-elsewhere=on
> > > 
> > > 
> > > then you could implement
> > > 
> > > 	dialbyprofile(normal-call, SIP/olle)
> > > 
> > > 
> > > That would make the dialplans easier to handle, but the specific dial  
> > > command would
> > > not have all the required information - you have to read dial.conf to  
> > > understand.
> > 
> > That is an interesting thought. 
> > 
> > It could even be accomplished without a new conf file in my idea.
> > Specifically, with the DIAL variable, you could create macros in your
> > dialplan that set your commonly used options before returning to dial.
> > Being done within extensions would also allow for a lot of the same
> > smart functionality that people may be doing right now.
> > 
> > Or you could possibly do this as a combined idea where your common
> > options are put into the profile in a dial.conf file and anything in the
> > DIAL var would overwrite the profile. 
> > 
> > Several options are available.
> 
> This stuff might work; but ugh! the ramifications to AEL!
> I'm not liking it already.

First, I haven't actually used AEL yet and hence my question being a bit
ignorant. 

Why would this cause any problem to AEL at all? What I am suggesting
would use current applications to set up a variable before dial is
called and dial then would work off of the variable itself. I would
expect that in that way, AEL wouldn't need any changes to be handled. In
fact, dialplans would change and so would the dial app, but that should
be the limit.  Pretty much the same thing with the profiles, it wouldn't
be handled by AEL but rather the new dial app.

Seems to me other than the dialplans that are deployed, there wouldn't
be any outside changes other than the dial app. And from where we
suggested a different app name for dial, even those deployed dialplans
wouldn't be affected.

Of course since this is a significant change, I assume this could only
go forward in trunk and the upcomming 1.6 release.
-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>