[asterisk-users] Using XML for configuration management, single-source-of-truth, etc.

[Jared Smith]

On Sat, 2007-12-08 at 13:55 -0800, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> Going back to my original posting, I was also suggesting that the parse 
> tree from Asterisk could be read in and then dumped out as XML, so that 
> other software could then ingest it... using it as a common format for 
> passing configuration from one package to another.

If you're serious about wanting to do that, it wouldn't be hard to write
a program that used the Asterisk manager interface (see the GetConfig
action) to read the Asterisk configs and write them out in another
format.

If you were really ambitious, you could even have Asterisk get it's
configs from XML by using the UpdateConfig AMI action, creating use of
#exec, or by writing a realtime driver for XML.

Personally, even though I'm a big fan of XML (and things like DocBook
and XSLT, and having written hundreds of pages of documentation in XML),
I don't see what putting the configuration in XML buys you, other than
the ability to check the validity of the config file (assuming, of
course, that someone writes a DTD and keeps it up to date).

In a nutshell, XML is no silver bullet.

-Jared Smith