[Kamailio-Devel] [Kamailio-Users] SIREMIS feedback

[Alex Balashov]

Daniel-Constantin Mierla wrote:

> although we have discussed internally at asipto, I want to see opinions 
> from others related to ability of displaying (eventually editing) config 
> file in siremis.

Do you mean just editing the text of the config?  Or do you mean editing 
the config in some high-level way?

You probably mean the former, but if by chance you mean the latter, I 
personally would recommend staying away from this.  It seems like it 
would be an unmanageable mess.

The problem is that Kamailio is far too polymorphic and extensible, and 
there are as many ways to write a configuration as there are to skin a 
cat.  Everyone's configuration file is going to have different 
attributes, except in the respects in which they all must be common of 
course.  But the applications vary immensely;  the config route script 
is part of what makes the system such a powerful building block of SIP 
telephony applications and platforms.

This means you have to build and maintain another another parser and 
lexer or hijack the existing one. Either way it would have to be 
outboard and feed data into the PHP application as Bison/flex/friends 
don't output PHP parsers.  Then, you are still left with the challenge 
of interpreting the many thousands of permutations of configuration that 
come out of the parser in various data structures, although you are 
assisted here by the relative rigidity of the route script syntax in 
contrast to, say, Perl.

The other alternative would be to take the approach of many web 
front-ends to complicated things;  have SIREMIS generate the 
configuration out of a template, and produce a result that is rich with 
meta-data.  This means it is not especially feasible to edit it manually 
afterward;  you must use SIREMIS for all aspects of configuration, else 
you break the meta-data and SIREMIS won't understand the configuration 
anymore.  That in turn means you are now limited in capabilities to 
merely the set of common things SIREMIS supports.  That is clearly a bad 
idea that is anathema to the very essence of the purpose of the route 
script.

-- Alex

-- 
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
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