[asterisk-users] bugs.digium.com

[Russell Bryant]

On Thu, 2006-07-27 at 08:32 -0600, Douglas Garstang wrote:
> I opened bug #0007490 the other day. The issue was that when you do a
> 'sip debug' on the Asterisk console, there was no way to have this
> output go _only_ to the messages file. Someone with the id of
> 'russell' in his infinite wisdom has deemed that this isn't a bug,
> closed it, and given me -2 karma points. 

The mantis user "russell" would be me.  Let me introduce myself.  

I have been an active Asterisk developer for about two years.  When I
first got involved in Asterisk development, almost nobody ran any
"release" of Asterisk.  Everyone ran the code straight out of the
development tree in CVS because that was the best that was available.

In the Fall of 2004, Mark Spencer asked me to take on the responsibility
of managing bug fix releases of Asterisk after he released Asterisk 1.0.
At that point, I monitored every change that Mark committed into the
development branch of Asterisk, and manually merged bug fixes into the
1.0 branch.  I did this for about a year, until the 1.2 release was
made.  During this time, I created all of the 1.0.X releases.

Since Asterisk 1.2 has been released, the development team has taken
more of a group responsibility of committing the bug fixes into the
release branch, which has resulted in higher quality releases, with much
less of a possibility of anything getting missed.  However, I am still
considered the Asterisk release maintainer and make decisions about what
gets included in the release branch when such decisions need to be made.

I have fixed countless bugs, added new features, and reviewed and
committed hundreds of contributions from the community of developers.
Needless to say, I have some experience in the process of Asterisk
development.

> It clearly is a bug, or at the VERY least, a limitation that needs to
> be fixed. So why the hell did he give me -2 karma points and say 'not
> actually a bug'. 

It is not a bug.  This is exactly how it is intended to work in the
current code.  I'm sorry if it was confusing to you.  However, the bug
tracker is not the appropriate place to go when you are confused about
configuration.

> Fine... so how do you file an enhancement request then? If there's no
> way to file an enhancement request, then this is the most appropriate
> place to file this.

The bug tracker is really is not a good place for feature requests.  You
have to understand that this is the tool we have for managing all of
Asterisk development contributions and bugs.  If every user posted every
feature they think should be implemented on there, it would make it much
more difficult for us to manage.

The developers *do* monitor the mailing lists.  One of the major reasons
we monitor the lists is to understand the issues that users are facing.
Believe me, if you start a discussion on this mailing list regarding
this issue, it will get noted, and if we are able, we will make
improvements to make things easier for you.  Also keep in mind that
there are many thousands of users with many different ideas and
drastically fewer developers that can implement them.

> Its damn irritating not being able to have 'sip debug' output go to a
> file only, and this is what the options in logger.conf imply you
> should be able to do, which is another reason I don't understand why
> he took this irrational action. 

I'll look over the text in logger.conf to see if I can make some things
more clear.  I will also be thinking about potential ways to implement
this new feature.  But, keep in mind that this is just another feature
request in quite large pool of them.  In the future, if you are unsure
of how to do something, if something is even possible, or are confused
about configuration options, it is much more appropriate to start a
discussion here.  Then, the details of what is going on, and what could
be implemented to make things better can be worked out.  We will see
this discussion and make note of it.

I am very passionate about my work on Asterisk.  I fix bugs, implement
new features, and do my best to improve the experience of every Asterisk
user.  Everything I do is in my mind what I have to do to ensure that I
am as productive as I can be to improve Asterisk.

> In a PRODUCTION environment, you can't be running a sip debug to your
> console. 

I'm not sure that this is as big of a deal as you make it out to be.
You can fairly easily have virtually no output to the Asterisk console.
Then, you can run "sip debug" on a specific peer or IP address.  The
output then really isn't that much.

-- 
Russell Bryant
Software Developer
Digium, Inc.