In my view the binary package install process needs a serious update. I’ve been considering changing from my current system (FreeSwitch) to Asterisk, so I wanted to setup a server in my test environment. It hasn’t gone well.
I don’t think compiling from source is appropriate for a production environment so I didn’t try that method. For my test I tried to install Asterisk 13 on a Centos 6.6 VM. What I found was:
- The instructions on the Wiki don’t work or are at best incomplete
- Once it does install, it adds “AsteriskNow” which I didn’t want and which makes system changes like modifying /etc/issue
- It adds many unneeded repositories to /etc/yum.repos.d/
- It requires the Digium repository and adds those too
I don’t understand why it does this, it seems very complicated and unnecessary. I did finally get it to work for 13.2 but when I tried to update via yum to 13.3 it broke. Now I can’t re-install it at all.
I recommend that the package dependencies be greatly simplified. It should be possible to add one .repo file (for example, asterisk-13.repo) and fully install everything required and update from there. If you need optional features from Digium, then you should be able to add a similar, single Digium repo for them.
The install and update process is a critical system administrator task. Having a clean and simple install process makes the application easier to manage and work better with modern automated admin tools like Chef and Puppet.
Please consider refactoring your package install system.