Hi,
I’m new to Asterisk. I’m using “The Future of Telephony” book as my guide. However, there are a lot of things that don’t match with version 1.4. When will the documentation be updated to reflect the changes introduced in version 1.4?
Thanks,
Ali Ali
I’m also a relative newcomer … and tend to be a disappointed newcomer more often than I’m happy.
Unless I’m missing something really fundamental, I find the state of the documentation to be somewhat deplorable. I own a copy of the Asterisk book, but that seems to cover Asterisk 1.2. Version 1.4 seems to have made some big changes, particularly with regard to the users.conf file.
I’m having a hard time finding information. It’s painful! Even most of the presumed sources of information – here, voip-info, digium – seem not to have information about 1.4.
Am I wrong?
have you read the documentation that ships with the Asterisk 1.4 source ? there are updated files in /docs and lots of new info in /configs if you read through them.
documentation will always be an issue with opensource software … you can either live with it, or contribute … it’s up to you.
Thanks. No, I haven’t red the docs but I’ll but that on my list.
I too have found the documentation lacking for ver. 1.4. I’ve skimmed through the Extensions.Conf file, but couldn’t find a lot of what I was looking for. After actually reading the O’reilly book, I find it the best presentation I’ve seen but there is so much more to Asterisk that it should be expanded and updated to include all commands that Asterisk understands today.
For several days now, I have been unsucessfull looking for something that documents the current v.1.4 Application Command set like O’reilly’s book does in it’s Appendix B.
If anyone knows of such a documnt, let me know.
Thanks,
Tom S.
I too have found the documentation lacking for ver. 1.4. I’ve skimmed through the Extensions.Conf file, but couldn’t find a lot of what I was looking for. After actually reading the O’reilly book, I find it the best presentation I’ve seen but there is so much more to Asterisk that it should be expanded and updated to include all commands that Asterisk understands today.
For several days now, I have been unsucessfull looking for something that documents the current v.1.4 Application Command set like O’reilly’s book does in it’s Appendix B.
If anyone knows of such a documnt, let me know.
Thanks,
Tom S.
This is always a scarey thing. If we cannot document where we are going, then where the heck are we going to end up?
On a side note, has anyone ever put together a flowchart of how the configuration files all intermix with their relative acryonoms?
Frank.
Everyone knows there’s a 2nd Edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, right?!? It covers 1.4… It even says so on the cover.
Get it here: Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition
Just did a search through AsteriskTFOT.pdf for the following:
Again from the previous post with an invalid answer below it:
Does anybody know where a process flow or flow chart is documented for AsteriskNOW with the default - extensions.conf and other related files that show primarily the [%context%] flow?
Sorry to disagree but, any time commands are deprecated, it seems to me there is some obligation to post clear syntax migration changes in places where they are readily available… like on the web, for instance.
Asterisk may be free, but it’s not free for organizations to have to review and rewrite all of their telephony applications every 18 months just because someone decides that Set(TIMEOUT(digit)=7) is more politically correct than DigitTimeout(7). It would have taken about one or two extra lines of source code to support both syntaxes without trashing existing apps that relied upon the older way of doing things. Is disk space and RAM really that scarce??
This design mentality would deter most Fortune 500 companies and government organizations from ever considering Asterisk as a telephony platform. It’s just too expensive to run the risk of having to rewrite all of your telephony applications every couple of years. Most organizations think of phone system replacement in terms of decades, not months.
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As soon as you have asterisk up enought that you can get to the CLI, the best documentation is built in, see below.
I have read that the asterisk gods have decided that when something is deprecated it will be supported through the release where it was deprecated and then removed in the next release.
So, the 1.2 dialplan stuff should work in 1.4 with some warnings. It will not work in 1.6. This is the time to change your code.
As far is the on line documentation goes, I do not recall the book mentioning this, but from the CLI you can do this:
na-it-asterisk*CLI> core show applications
-= Registered Asterisk Applications =-
Answer: Answer a channel if ringing
(list of all applications)
na-it-asterisk*CLI> core show application dial
-= Info about application ‘Dial’ =-
(Full info on dial application)
na-it-asterisk*CLI> core show functions
Installed Custom Functions:
(full list of functions)
na-it-asterisk*CLI> core show function BLACKLIST
-= Info about function ‘BLACKLIST’ =-
(full info abotu a function)
I myself find it useful to put at least a condensed version of the application info in the extension.conf file itself. At least for stuff I do not use all the time. An example fropm one of my extensions.conf files:
; Directory(vm-context[|dial-context[|options]])
; Option e causes IVR to give caller your direct extension number for future reference
; Option f causes directory to search by first name (last name is the default)
exten => 777,1,Directory(default,default,e)
exten => 666,1,Directory(default,default,ef)
This makes it easier for me to know what the arguments are and for the next guy who has to dig through the code. I find it funny how many tiems people have issues with lack of documentation and then turn out code of their own that is a pain for the next person to dig through…
And a closing thought…
For years a company bought a legacy phone system had had no software at all. Firmware perhaps but no software. The system was born and died in the vast majority of cases with the same feature set.
We now have software based PBX’s and we can extend the feature set. We can do all sorts of cool things that we could not do in the past.
That being said, at some level you need to look and see if there is a driving reason to always jump to the next level, besides making the output of core show version look more up to date.
That is, before you even start seeing a lot of issues upgrading to 1.4 or 1.4 or whatever, you need to ask yourself, what does my system/company/client get from this?
Unless you can find a real good reason to move, such as a security flaw that is not being back patched, or a feature you really need, why switch? Or at least, why worry about switching right away. I am speaking mostly of systems where the core code is mature and you are only doing simple day to day admin stuff on.
Something to think about at any rate…