[Serdev] SUMMARY of: Loooong thread on SER who/what, architecture, design etc

[Greger V. Teigre]

In order to keep the important, actionable parts of our looooong threads 
initiated by Dragos, I have (with great pain) read through all the posts 
again and for those who participated or did not venture into the thread 
at all, I here bring a summary of what I found as questions, wishes, 
suggestions for improvements etc that we should make sure do not disappear.

I have not ventured to add any value or evaluation. 

My suggestion is that we split these issues into groups:
1. Those that can be put on the tracker's wishlist (i.e. clearly defined)
2. Those that can be marked as "not to be acted upon"
3. Those that need more elaboration

For #3, we can either write up a page on iptel.org (one person starts) 
or/and have a discussion on serdev.
Feel free to comment on how we can move things forward or volunteer!

g-)

Non-technical
============
 * Model for making design/architecture decisions (one strong leader vs 
technical board vs consensus)
 * Workshop to discuss these things (Jiri takes lead)
 * Collaboration workshop/"Open Source SIP conference thingie", 
Asterisk/Olle (Olle, do you take a lead?)
 * Need for more Better Current Practices (BCP) documents

Interface/module-developer-stuff
============
 * New module API (unified access to functions, remove parsing headers 
from module's "need to do", abstract lump-handling away from module's 
"need to know"
 * New transport-interface
  * Better interface between SER and applications like SEMS so SER can 
more easily be used as a front-end "sipstack"
 * Review existing low-level management/communication interfaces (FIFO, 
socket, XMLRPC), do they support the needs of integration with the 
various types of applications that people want to integrate with SER?
  * Simplified cfg.lex, cfg.y
  * Improved script engine (support for variable number of parameters, 
better avp and variable support)
  * Are there anything missing/that can be improved with the process model?

Things that mainly affect ser.cfg
==================
 * Improved control through standard flags/variables that can be set 
across modules (and core)
 * Support for dialogs (new layer of config file? or standalone 
application? SEMS?)
  * Unified interface for configuration parameters (across command line 
and configuration)
 * A new, more simplified layer to turn on/off pre-defined features 
(giving three layers of adaptions: beginner, advanced ser.cfg, developer)

Other improvements
============
 * Rewrite of tm
 * Code style brush-ups
 * Transaction state improvements, i.e ability to replicate state across 
servers
 * Handling of multiple downstream branches
 * How to make sure all SIP proxies know or get to a) the AOR's 
registrar b) the AOR's outbound proxy (for NAT binding)
 * Improved AVP framework improving performance and inter-communication