[asterisk-users] New CentOS 5 repo: dahdi, asterisk, freepbx RPMs

[Jason Parker]

D Tucny wrote:
> 2009/3/26 John Morris <asterisk at zultron.com <mailto:asterisk at zultron.com>>
> 
>     Hi, Axel.
> 
>     Axel Thimm wrote:
>      > How about merging in your changes/improvements/new packages with
>      > ATrpms (and automatically later into rpmrepo.org
>     <http://rpmrepo.org>)? That way we won't
>      > have further fragmentation and a larger user base to test bits (which
>      > will be distributed in stable, testing etc repos).
> 
>     Of course I'd love to contribute my changes to ATrpms.  Some of the
>     small changes I made, such as adding OSLEC to the DAHDI RPMs, might be
>     nice for ATrpms users.  I'll whip up some patches against the ATrpms
>     sources.
> 
>     My problem with ATrpms, though, is that the RPMs make use of many custom
>     macros that make them unbuildable outside the ATrpms environment.  I
>     understand that might be necessary for RPMs like DAHDI that build kernel
>     modules for several versions of several distros, where vanilla specfile
>     code would get hairy.  (I think we had this discussion a couple of years
>     ago on the ATrpms ML.)  Since I don't have to worry about multiple
>     versions of multiple distros in my environment, I prefer to use vanilla
>     specfile that will rebuild on anyone's CentOS 5 system.
> 
> 
> Alternatively, there's also the RPMS at
> http://packages.asterisk.org/centos/ which seem to have a nice spread of
> options available, including 1.4/1.6 packages, are pretty nicely
> modularised and seem to be kept pretty fresh... They do however seem to
> have some issues that your RPMS (and Axel's) don't (e.g. why wouldn't an
> init file be included? and where's the changelog?)... Perhaps it would
> be useful to help the digium packager build some better packages... That
> would also help with reducing fragmentation, if there were decent
> quality 'official' packages available then it would save the time and
> effort Axel and the rpmrepo.org <http://rpmrepo.org> folks too as they
> could in theory base any extras on those packages rather than needing to
> maintain the entire set...
> 
> d
> 

As the author of the RPMs at http://packages.asterisk.org/ (as well as
http://packages.digium.com/), and the maintainer of the repositories, I wanted
to respond to this.

I would love it if some of this were to happen.  I am very familiar with Axel
and ATrpms - he has proven countless times that he knows what he's doing when it
comes to this sort of thing.  Getting help/advice from somebody like him would
be extremely beneficial.  As far as basing the ATrpms (or others) packages on
the AsteriskNOW packages, if that is something that Axel (or others) wanted to
do, I would be more than willing to help with whatever is needed.  On a somewhat
related, and very interesting note - I found out yesterday that the latest
trixbox beta is using these RPMs (without even needing to rebuild them, in some
cases).  Hopefully that means I'm doing something right.

D, the two issues you brought up are valid.  For the Asterisk RPMs, I honestly
don't know why there isn't an init script - I actually thought there was one.
FreePBX is what starts Asterisk in AsteriskNOW, so it was easily overlooked.  It
will be there in future builds.  As far as the changelog, it was one of those
things that I intentionally left out for a while, and I kept meaning to "do it
later".  Really, it's because I'm not sure what should go into an RPM changelog
(I'd love to hear from anybody that has any insight into that).

As always, if anybody has any ideas, suggestions, criticism, or any other type
of feedback, I'd be happy to hear from you.