Asterisk 1.6 - not so scary! curious?

[darmock]

the current 1.6 asterisk is 1.6.1 which will be updated to 1.6.1.1 in the next day or so. We don't package Beta or RC's as part of the load files generally.

Tom

 

[dswartz]

what is irritating

is not so much dial plan syntax changing as constantly deprecating (and then later removing outright) various commands.

 

[darmock]

Welcome to our world! It is one of the reasons we decided to freeze a known good version of Asterisk which just happens to have zaptel and use that as our flagship.

My insight into it is that Asterisk is created and modified by a committee of "experts" who don't actually have to use the product in the real world. This way they can change it to whatever they want without understanding why change for syntax should happen very slowly or at least a compatibility mode should be available.

This is why you get the feature dejure every time a new version is released and yet they still have not fixed the loss of DNS problems which causes sip trunks to stop and then the box. Instead we get new and improved ways of doing the same old stuff when some of the underlying problems have not been fixed.

While the old way of doing PBX's was hardware based it at least let you invest in a system and keep it for years with no problems. Of course this stifled innovation and kept things the same for a long time. Then compare this to software based PBX's which are innovative and change constantly but may have a higher TCO. One of the reasons that the PBX old guard is still selling systems.

Oh well I rant!!!

Tom

 

[dswartz]

In fairness to the digium folks, it would be nice if major clients (like freepbx) were more attentive to the 'feature X has been deprecated' warnings that will be written to the logs. I remember one such recently where I found out that LookupCIDName was deprecated in 1.4 and removed in 1.6, and I found out the hard way when the phone book stopped working outright when I moved from 1.4 to 1.6

 

[darmock]

While this is true I believe this is more of a chicken and egg argument. If they had not deprecated a particular way of doing things or left in a backwards compatibility layer things would go smoother. While it is nice if all of the non digium software providers dance to the Digium beat it just will not happen. Oh well


Tom

 

[dswartz]

oh, i agree 100% about not changing stuff like that without a backward compatibility mode. i'm just saying that, like it or not, when i warn you 'feature X will go away in the next release!', and you went to that release without fixing it, well...