Bug#1031046: Asterisk packaging

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Hi Olivier,

Quoting Olivier (2023-06-02 11:24:44)
> I volunteer to help to package Asterisk either in current official
> Debian repo or in an alternative repository.

Great!

Please subscribe to our mailinglist and discuss more there.
And please consider joining our IRC/Matrix chat room/channel for more
casual hangout.
Info on both is listed at https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/VoIP/


> The perspectives of Asterisk Deb packaging is talked about in [1] (I'm
> the original author of this thread).
> 
> One thing that comes to mind reading [1] is that several people
> recommend packaging from scratch while it seems to me, that
> contributing in coordinated activities may lower the amount of work
> (no need to build a repo, to configure host to use a custom repo, ...)
> and increase the outcome quality as Debian standards are quite high.
> 
> If having Asterisk distributed with Bookwom is a lost cause, maybe we
> can try to have latest Asterisk 20.3 be packaged "the Debian way" in
> unstable repo and self assign the goal that this build would done by
> new contributors, under the control of experienced mainteners ?
> 
> Then, what could be the best media to read or add doc about Asterisk packaging ?
> 
> [1] https://community.asterisk.org/t/status-and-perspectives-of-asterisk-package-on-debian-bookworm/97087/11

I see 4 approaches:

1) Use what the Asterisk project officially offers.

2) Use what Debian project officially offers.

3) Use what Debian semi-officially offers as "backports".

4) DIY.

Each of those 4 approaches can be done either with least possible effort
on your own part, or through more active collaboration.

Option 1 is good for some users.  Evidently it isn't for me, or I would
not have spent the past 20 years adding patches and build routines on
top of what upstream projects could offer: I firmly believe that it is
benificial to have a "second stage development" focusing on integration
across upstream projects, and I firmly believe that Debian is the best
for doing that.  For those disagreeing, use option 1 or 4 :-)

Option 2 is currently off the table, because for Debian to be
officially "stable" the work has to be done *before* the distribution is
released as "stable", and not enough work was done for that to happen
for the current stable release.

Option 3 is still valid.  It requires help, not on climbing the whole
mountain of building a package, but on concrete narrow tasks of checking
for security bugs, isolating (or writing from scratch if you are really
cool) patches to fix those bugs, and (when baked into a package) testing
that the bugs are indeed fixed.  Only with *both* packaging *and*
maintenance (which includes security sheparding) of that packaging can
the work become semi-officially available in Debian backport.

Option 4 is always an option.  And for me personally is always a big
waste of time, compared to the more efficient collaboration possible
using Debian as a platform for it.  Feel free to disagree, but then
discuss those non-Debian approaches elsewhere than in Debian :-)


Hope to see a lot of you enthusiasts in the Debian VoIP team mailinglist
soon.  More info at https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/VoIP/


Kind regards,

 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
 * Sponsorship: https://ko-fi.com/drjones

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