At 16:48 19-11-2003 -0600, you wrote:
And you will have control of your devices. The problem is that many of the call features are intrisically related to how the channel type signals to devices. Hence, the functionality needs to be at the channel driver level.
Actually, I don't agree. It is related to how the signalling toward the _other party's_ channel should be (for instance redirection signals instead of dialling, if supported - yes, that would be nice!)
There are two problems, as I see it: first of all, you're cluttering the dialplan with features that ought to be intrinsic to the system. Note that you're going to have to include EVERY context in which phones start with these programmed call features. Second, considering that everybody is going to have pretty much exactly the same logic in every dialplan, that's a lot of wasted time (and a great potential for typos and missed logic). Asterisk is not supposed to be a barebones system (as you seem to be describing); it is, indeed, a full-featured system.
You are assuming everybody is going to have the same logic. This is not true. First of all we want to use different access codes than are currently in use. Second of all, it might be possible to differentiate in what we supply if we are working in a billable environment. Additional services can be at a premium, so being able to allow or disallow access will make sense. And even then, people will want to make minor tweaks in the behaviour of the services (like playing back a confirmation prompt upon redirection, or just hanging up).
These all seem like minor things, but they relate very strongly to what the end user percieves. This is precisely why it should be accessible to system administrators rather than programmers - the local organisation offering a pbx on asterisk knows much better than anyone else what their users expect of them.
But if you really feel strongly about scripting your own call features, note that you can already override existing call features simply by including your own logic for that code in your dialplan.
Ok, now that would make sense :-)
Florian
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