newbie guide to asterisk on f11?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Tue, 12 May 2009, Bob Gustafson wrote:

> I imagine that when F11 goes golden, and if it does include the
> 1.6.1 version of Asterisk, it will include all of the necessary
> packages, or will 'depend' on them.
>
> My guess is that so much time is being spent on sorting out other
> Fedora problems, Asterisk will be whipped into shape at the last
> moment, perhaps with a regress to an earlier version.
>
> You are playing with several moving targets.

  if you can tolerate a bit more rambling, i have a question that has
ramifications beyond just asterisk and involves packaging strategies.

  in order to debug the issues related to installing asterisk-1.6.1 as
an rpm, i also downloaded the tarball and installed *that* via the
normal configure/make/install process, and the differences in the end
result are ... interesting.

  if i install via yum, then try to run asterisk, the invocation gives
me the following warning:

  ... Error opening firmware directory
'/usr/share/asterisk/firmware/iax': No such file or directory

a little poking around showed me that that would be satisfied by
independently installing the asterisk-firmware package, whose entire
content is the single file /usr/share/asterisk/firmware/iax/iaxy.bin.
but that brings up the obvious question -- how closely should
installing software as an rpm file track installing it via building
from a tarball?

  if i install from a tarball, then i'll get that file and i won't get
a warning diagnostic whenever i run asterisk.  if, however, i install
the current package using yum, suddenly i get that warning because i
might not realize that that file is provided via a different and
independent package.  that strikes me as a violation the principle of
least astonishment.  is there a reason that the behaviour of
installing via yum clearly deviates from the behaviour of installing
via tarball?

  that's not the only example -- installing via tarball installs the
files /etc/asterisk/{alsa,oss}.conf when you run "make samples",
whereas the core asterisk package doesn't include those files.  and as
someone pointed out, you get those from two *more* packages.

  i understand the value in breaking software into smaller and more
modular packages so users can be more selective about what they
install, but there's also the danger that, if users are used to
building from source, then installing the base package via yum will
leave them with missing files and directories and quite possibly
confuse them.

  and, to close this off, the reason i'm bringing this up is that i'm
trying to follow along a recipe for basic asterisk installation and
configuration that works fine when asterisk is built from a tarball,
but is missing components unless you know exactly what
asterisk-related packages need to be installed to get the same end
result.

  is this making any sense?

rday
--

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Linked In:                             http://www.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
========================================================================