I try to install only RPMs on my machines and use yum to update so that I can cleanly update all my packages. I’ve encountered many problems in the past installing software from just tarballs. It makes it very difficult to upgrade your system in the future. I did not find any RPMs for all the modules that are needed for Asterisk. Are there any plans to put this software into a packaged format such as RPM so that we can use yum to update everything and let it take care of all the dependencies?
there are rpm repos maintained by assorted people elsewhere. google will help you find them.
personally i think Digium should stay well away from RPM for Asterisk.
I wasn’t implying that RPM had to be the ONLY delivery mechanism. But it would make a lot of sense for Asterisk to use a package mechanism that works with yum and that’s RPM. Asterisk could release both the RPM and the tarballs. Take your pick. For me after years of fussing around with tarballs and then six months later trying to upgrade something and forgetting about some important detail, I finally disciplined myself to use only RPMs and things have been very smooth ever since. I can upgrade the OS and the upgrade will actually work without getting into all kinds of problems due to a bunch of installed tarballs. But to each his own. RPM and yum is what works for me.
I dont run into any problems using the tarballs from digium. I installed asterisk using tarballs in 8 centos servers, 4 Fedora , 4 debian and yes even ubuntu servers. I never encountered anything that is out of the ordinary ( you should know that asterisk requires some packages right?)
I think digium should try to stay away from any package management stuff and stay with the tarballs that way the users should be force to learn the basics of linux first before going about using asterisk.
The tarballs are actually pretty easy to deal with. Once you learn what other packages Asterisk needs, its straight forward.
Of course tarballs are easy to deal with. That isn’t the issue. The issue is about having a universal method of dealing with software dependencies from an entire machine perspective. That’s what package managers provide. RedHat, CentOS, and all the other Linux distributions of software could never exist without the use of a package manager. All the various components that make up these distributions are packaged because it makes it possible to update them individually or as a whole distribution successfully. What breaks the ability to upgrade on OS on a machine is software that is installed outside of the package manager. If you like hard, rigid systems that are basically frozen then tarballs work just fine. But if you like to have upgradeable systems then you need to use a package manager for every software component.
Again I reiterate my point which seems to have been ignored: You can have it BOTH ways. Asterisk can continue to release tarballs for those who like this method, but it should also release an RPM that can integrate Asterisk into the bigger picture of all the software components being managed on a system.
i don’t think anyone has missed your point. but how about this : package managers are great for general purpose machines. Asterisk isn’t a general purpose application.
take a look at the menuselect options in 1.4. how are you going to implement that in a package manager ? install every binary/module. what about faxing ? h323 support ? Sangoma hardware ? anything else that requires a source patch and a recompile. it ain’t gonna fly for anything except “standard” installs. and i bet no 2 Asterisk installs are the same.
There are many software components in any Linux distribution that can be considered special purpose. Just because a machine performs a specialized task does not affect its use of a package manager. I form specialized machines all the time out of software components in the Linux distribution. Further, almost every piece of modern software is designed in a modular fashion so that you can configure it at runtime. If Asterisk is relying upon source patching and compiling after installation then that is quite primitive and quite surprising.
Primitive? I think not. Personally, I don’t want things included for the sake of including them just because 1 or two people out of several thousand may think they want it.
I already use an operating system like that.
I want my Asterisk system to be lean and fast, not bloated.
The reference to primitive was not in terms of the Asterisk software. Asterisk is a very sophisticated piece of software that performs many functions. Everybody loves Asterisk, the software. The reference was in relation to the way in which the software is designed, built and configured. You can have very sophisticated software systems that have less than sophisticated designs and configurations. As far as packaging in general: tarballs are a very basic form of packaging but they don’t have any intelligence as far as checking dependencies and performing installation tasks necessary to setup the software. The more capable forms of packaging, such as RPM, not only contain the software modules, but they also perform dependency checks and also perform installation tasks. And none of that has any bearing upon whether a system is lean and mean, bloated or not bloated. Nothing has been added or subtracted from the software itself. The system still runs exactly the same in operation.
Anyway, I can sense that there is resistance to consideration of this idea. It will happen eventually anyway as a natural progression of the evolution of the software. In the meantime I will discuss Asterisk packaging with some independent packagers.
Actually what I would not mind seeing is some type of package that triggered the dependencies to be installed. For example, a package named asterisk-deps. This package would install all necessary dependencies and then allow for the manual installation of Asterisk.
I guess I’d like to see that since I’m a lazy sort of person. I honestly don’t know what the minimum packages are. I kind of cheat. I use the install script from an old version of Asterisk @ Home. I’m sure there are things included that aren’t needed by a bare Asterisk install.
I think something like this is available for Gentoo. I know there are some old versions of Asterisk out there for Debian. I guess you could install the old version to get the dependencies and then install the new version from tarball.
Personally, I like the Gentoo way of compiling everything from scratch. One day, I’ll finally figure out how to install Gentoo 
I’ve used Linux for over 10 years now, and the more I use it, the less I like the magical way of packages. The more I like to know what goes where. I find that hard to figure out as a package. As a beginner, I could not have gotten anywhere without packages.
BTW, if I’m not mistaken, Mandriva comes with an older version as an RPM.
and that’s just from users, never mind from the people you are asking to consider creating RPMs.
[quote=“greno”]In the meantime I will discuss Asterisk packaging with some independent packagers.[/quote] as was said earlier, they already exist in assorted forms. have fun.
I’m not sure about rpm’s but you can get Asterisk/zaptel with apt atleast. I can’t see Digium making and maintaining their own rpm, deb, tarball, etc. Package maintainers of distro’s will create the packages and maintain them. As baconbuttie said… there are people out there doing this currently. If you want an an official rpm from Digium you can get that with ABE.
found some evidence of previous asterisk-devs doing packaging !! voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+status (July 2004) … RPMs built for Asterisk 1.0 RC2