On May 12, 2009, at 13:52, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
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
It really shouldn't be an error, only a warning, if that. Many
telephony hardware devices (such as the discontinued Digium iaxy)
require a firmware upload before they will work. If you don't have
the device, in theory, you shouldn't get the error/warning.
Since you got an error, the assumption is that the installation quit
at that point, thus there are probably other pieces which were not
installed... And it should be filed in BZ as a bug.
In this particular case, since iaxy is optional, I think the
installation process (yum) just cruises through that error and
ignores it.
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?
If you use the Fedora System->Administration->Add/Remove Software
tool - and search for 'Asterisk', you will see a list of packages
that are 'related' to Asterisk - if only because they include the
word 'Asterisk' somewhere exposed to the search.
To load those packages (and any hidden dependencies), click the
checkbox in front of the name. You will see the packages related to
alsa and oss here. However, most of these packages are not needed to
run Asterisk. If they were needed, then there should have been a
dependency for that package in the Asterisk package (and there would
already be a mark in the checkbox saying it was already installed)
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.
I doubt there is any organized process for going from tarball to
modular packages. Some applications are more modularly organized than
others. The key is to look for pieces which are common to other
applications - and split them off - and use the code developed by
someone else. The problem here is independently developed code can
independently change, and break the application.
Going back to the Add/Remove Software tool list, you will see a
number of 'helper' pieces - adapters for MySQL or PostgreSQL for
example. The Asterisk developers are not going to re-create a
database, so they use an existing database and write an adapter
(which presumably depends on a particular version of the database).
If, as a user of Asterisk, you don't want to squirrel away stuff in a
database, you won't download the database adapter, and you won't
depend on that particular database manager.
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?
Yes, of course. Thought is useful.
rday
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