make dahdi a suggests or recommends

I concur on this. All my asterisk PBXs are IP only and having to drag in build-essential is non-optimal

Seconded. I ended up using equivs to build a dummy package which Provides: dahdi.
(Of course equivs also drags in the whole build environment, but I can do that on a machine that happens to not be our production VOIP gateway!)

On second thought, MeetMe needs /dev/dahdi/dummy or it simply won't work.

So a note in the README (or even the package description) and a Recommends: for the dahdi driver are the minimum requirement.

Conflicting goals, but then if you set up Asterisk as a SIP-only PBX on a resource-limited small machine, ideally without routing the actual audio through it, you're unlikely to host conference calls …

I was under the impression that most installations at least used dahdi_dummy for a timing device.. The packages should target the majority of use cases, and I can see the frustration with having to pull in additional stuff your setup doesn't require.

I'm not sure really how to progress with this. I want users to have a system that works as well as we can make it, by simply installing one thing. Perhaps it would be better to remove the depends, and create an asterisk-full meta package.

> dahdi_dummy for a timing device

Well, asterisk uses the RTC when that isn't available.

Anyway, isn't Recommends: meant to imply "if you deselect this, OK, but you better know what you're doing"?

@Dave as of 1.6.1 you no longer need timing for dahdi. See http://www.russellbryant.net/blog/2008/06/16/asterisk-16-now-with-a-new-timing-api/

@Mattias, from the Ubuntu Policy Manual: "The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together with this one in all but unusual installations." I don't think anyone would be uncomfortable with such a relationship between dahdi and asterisk; in fact it seems sensible. As for MeetMe, it does indeed require dahdi for timing, but ConfBridge, which was added in 1.6.2, has no such dependency.

@herb: Like the upstream issue mentions, we will loose a fair bit of functionally removing DAHDI from Asterisk. Specifically, res_musiconhold.so. As for ConfBridge, yes it does not depend on DAHDI, however it also does not support the same functionality as MeetMe.

I do agree, a meta package would be a good way to move.

Version: 1:1.8.3.3-1 contains this fix.