[Asterisk-Users] Limitations of aah

[David Josephson]

Dean Collins asks about limitations to aah/AMP that keep some people 
from adopting it entirely, and resorting to editing the config files 
directly. I'm one of those, but it's getting a lot better. Note, I tried 
0.3 for an experiment, began again with 0.5 which works fine (with 4 
clone FXOs, some different sip phones, an ATA and interface to various 
iax and sip peers) and am planning to migrate to the next version soon.

One of the good things about aah is that unlike other precooked 
installs, it actually compiles the installation on your box, which 
verifies that you have a development environment so that you *can* make 
patches etc without worrying about whether you have the right compiler, 
libraries and utilities.

And yes, you can edit all the config files directly from within AMP. I 
just find it usually quicker to do it from the shell. If someone is 
fluent with vi or nano, it's hard for them to accept a GUI cut-n-paste 
editor.

The only thing that's really missing is the command to reload whatever 
is needed to implement changes that have been made. A plain reload 
doesn't see zap channel changes for instance. When you edit those files, 
it should know to restart * when needed.

My biggest complaint is the lack of documentation. There will (probably, 
for most people) always be things we want to do in the dialplan that 
need to be written from scratch rather than drop-in from AMP. It would 
be nice to know where the globals defined in each 
[filename]_additional.conf were used by aah and AMP; comments on each 
line would be great. The AMP team should concentrate on documenting the 
AMP interface and let the Asterisk doc team work on documenting the 
commands. And FOP is another set of docs -- it took me some time to find 
the config files, and who knows what's possible within them? Let us know 
how to use AMP to pass stuff to * unless you are willing and able to 
track all the apps within it at once.

--
David Josephson