asterisk users - Sep 2012 - User expected behavior of musiconhold and AGI's "stream file"

Hi everyone,

I am your friendly neighborhood developer here with a question that may 
impact some of you.

Right now there is a small discussion occurring on the Asterisk 
development mailing list about the expected behavior of music on hold 
and AGI's "stream file". Presently if you start music on hold and
then
call "stream file" the music on hold will be *stopped* but not
*restarted*.

Do you think this behavior is correct?

Do you depend on this behavior knowingly?

Do you depend on this behavior without knowing it?

The proposition on the mailing list is to add yet another knob to allow 
you to control whether it is restarted or not upon completion of the 
stream file and to change the default behavior for Asterisk 12 to have 
it restart music on hold.

I look forward to your responses so you can help with the ultimate 
decision for this discussion.

Cheers,

-- 
Joshua Colp
Digium, Inc. | Senior Software Developer
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at:  www.digium.com  & www.asterisk.org

On 28/09/12 08:23 AM, Joshua Colp wrote:
> I am your friendly neighborhood developer here with a question that may
> impact some of you.
You're friendly? :)
> Right now there is a small discussion occurring on the Asterisk
> development mailing list about the expected behavior of music on hold
> and AGI's "stream file". Presently if you start music on hold
and then
> call "stream file" the music on hold will be *stopped* but not
*restarted*.
>
> Do you think this behavior is correct?
I guess part of the question is; can you trigger it to be re-enabled 
after the stream file?
> The proposition on the mailing list is to add yet another knob to allow
> you to control whether it is restarted or not upon completion of the
> stream file and to change the default behaviour for Asterisk 12 to have
> it restart music on hold.
>
> I look forward to your responses so you can help with the ultimate
> decision for this discussion.
My question about being able to re-enable it poses an interesting one. 
Since this is a programmatic method of controlling things, do you really 
want to automatically do something that wasn't explicitly defined?

As someone who might interface via a program, I'm thinking I would 
prefer things to continue operating as they do now. If my program 
already accounted for this, then I've already triggered MOH to restart 
after the file. Another question might be; is there a way to determine 
if MOH was playing prior to my call to stream file so I can reset the 
previous state?

My gut tells me that if this has been like this for a long time, and is 
how it worked originally, that how it works now be left as the default, 
and if you want to add an option that allows you to turn it on, that be 
the best approach here. Changing this can only make it a backwards 
compatibility issue. Someone who has run into this and needs it to act 
differently will seek out the new option after reading about it in the 
CHANGES file.

In an ideal scenario, a system upgrade should require the least amount 
of knob turning.

-- 
Leif Madsen
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/asterisk