[Serdev] SER as an extendable codebase/SIP stack - was: So who/what is SER for, anyway?

[Greger V. Teigre]

Greger's comment: I interpret the first part of Dragos post as a 
frustration related to using SER's code base to realize another 
SIP-related application, i.e. using SER instead of a SIP stack. Thus, I 
call this thread: SER as an extendable codebase/SIP stack.
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Hi all,

I am not sure if I should start this thread or not... recently some heat
came up on the dev list ("usrloc loading") and the most important thing
out of it (and neutral, because somehow the discussion included stuff
like ser vs openser) is what Greger blogged here
http://sipstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/who-is-ser-for.html . I wouldn't
have replied to any of it, but Greger pointed out that SER became the
basis for other projects, like the Open IMS Core that I am working on at
the moment and if SER's developers noticed us, maybe our experience and
opinions might be of interest to them. (And the Open IMS Core is not the
only one, not even the only IMS CSCF one...)

Some of you might receive this as SER bashing. But please understand
that I only want to point out the parts that I, for one, really hate, in
the hope that the future would bring something good. I think that SER is
a wonderful piece of software, but it just shows it's age and has some
cans of worms here and there.

So for the past years I have been working and playing with NGN concepts.
Part of my work are some SER modules + scripts that would enable the use
of SER as some sort of basic IMS CSCFs. However, the most annoying thing
that I had to deal with is SER's "design". Whenever something does not
work, you need to make changes in too many places and then suffer the
consequences as you will surely break something else. With every new
feature that you want to put it, you have to think about redesigning
parts of SER. When you look at the code, you can understand the reasons
for sure - like performance. But if you do not have a lot of
digging-experience through SER's code, you won't be able to do much.Then
it is almost impossible for me to assign even simple tasks to beginners
and as such our progress is extremely slow.