ViCiDial and Asterisk 21

[martinch]

Good morning guys,

I always hang out in #asterisk on Libera as I love learning about it and I love ViCi and love learning about that too. One thing that came up was about Asterisk versions and as of Asterisk 21 (unreleased version of Asterisk) a number of key Asterisk modules are being deprecated that ViCi relies on are being removed completely from the Asterisk codebase...specifically;

- app_meetme - the big one here. ViCi is built entirely around MeetMe conferences. It has been superceded by ConfBridge. I don't think I've seen any code introduced into my version of ViCi that supports ConfBridge. I asked the Asterisk guys straight up if MeetMe and ConfBridge had any kind of similarity but it appears they are not. This would mean core dialler changes would be needed to adapt.

- res_monitor - Good ole Monitor is being retired. This is primarily used for call recordings on the ViCi platform. I have mentioned the term Monitor in #asterisk a lot of times only to be met with "Use MixMonitor!". I haven't seen any use in ViCi but this should be something we can overcome.

- chan_sip - Good ole chan_sip is also being retired. However, I saw we got PJSIP support last year so we've good here (thanks for the contributors on that piece!).

The last Asterisk version to support these features will be Asterisk 20 due for release later this year. It will be an LTS release which will take the project to 2026 for full support and then security patches into 2027.

Asterisk Versions -> https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/ ... k+Versions

Asterisk Module Deprecation -> https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/ ... precations

ViCiDial is going to make that deadline right? We need more years of ViCi! There is an option for someone to become a maintainer for these old modules so that might be an option.

Thanks,
Martin.

[mflorell]

I've been posting about MeetMe being removed on Twitter this week,
https://twitter.com/vicidial_dev/status ... 3573395468

Yes, we have a plan. It's been known for several years now that MeetMe would be removed, and we already started working on ConfBridge compatibility as part of our Asterisk 18 code compatibility work earlier this year. While ConfBridge is not a drop-in replacement for MeetMe, it will allow us some more flexibility and possibly some new features as a result of the move to ConfBridge. Hopefully we'll have that code ready for beta testing in a few months.

As for "Monitor" being removed, that change should be lower impact, although it will probably require manual changes to the default dialplans on older dialers once it is gone from the Asterisk codebase. Again, we're going to try to make these changes available as a part of our Asterisk 18 compatibility code changes.

The old "chan_sip" module being deprecated has been known in the Asterisk community as something that was going to happen for over a decade at this point, although it wasn't until more recently that PJSIP was better supported and tested to the point that we wanted to add compatibility for it. We thoroughly tested PJSIP last year and we even have some clients using it in production now with Asterisk 16, so we're good to go with that one.