It's not that Digium don't want fax or t.38 support, it's just that it is not very likely for Steve Underwood to provide it for Asterisk. I'm sure that Digium are very keen for someone to write and contribute t.38 code for Asterisk, it's just that there aren't very many people with the required knowledge and willingness to contribute in that area.

The reasons are sorta complex, but as I understand it there are two issues. Spandsp will not be included in Asterisk as Steve will not disclaim the it to Digium, preferring to keep his code under GPL. Likewise, Digium won't accept code that isn't disclaimed - Spandsp could never be included in ABE for example without a disclaimer and it wouldn't make business sense for Digium to have code in the free distribution that can't be in their commercial distribution.

The second issue is that it is often very difficult to have code accepted into trunk. An example of this is the t.38 related code that Steve was working on for Asterisk in late 2005. Whilst not directly spandsp, these were backend changes inside asterisk that were required in order to interface t.38 into asterisk. Eventually he gave up and is now focussing his efforts on openpbx which is pure gpl and is easier to get code into trunk, so sort of a path of least resistance - why try to get code into asterisk when it is easier to get it into the fork.

Fow now, it is easiest to use hylafax / spandsp with asterisk. The majority of the hard work has been done and Lee Howard is very responsive to user queries.

Anyhow, thats my understanding and I could be way off the mark.

Craig

----- Original Message ----- From: "Patrick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 10:42 PM
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Re: Asterisk Faxing Support


On Thu, 2007-02-08 at 13:55 +0100, Tomislav ParĨina wrote:
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
> Asterisk 1.2 has no support of t.38 whatsoever, the call will drop
> before t.38 is ever utilised, not even pass-thru.
>
> 1.4 Adds support for T.38 pass through only and no other sort of
> faxing, the endpoint must support T.38 and you must send your call to
> a T.38 gateway and you must not use NAT anywhere in  your network and
> you must enable re-invites which could cause CDRs not to reflect the
> true details of the call.
>
> Asterisk/Digium also has no interest in any further interest in
> expanding T.38 or faxing support in Asterisk.
>
> Steve Underwood and the other fine persons that have helped to develop
> the software DSPs and other stuff required for FoIP support also have
> no interest in writing any further faxing support for Asterisk (RxFax,
> TxFax + the newest span_dsp wont even compile, much less work under
> Asterisk any more) probably because they know it will never be
> included into the Asterisk code.

Someone please tell me this isn't truth.

Afaik it is true that it will not be included in the Asterisk source
because Steve will not disclaim the code to Digium (which he off course
is entitled to). I compiled the latest spandsp (iirc 0.0.3pre27) on a
FC6 box and it compiles fine.

On Steve's website there are versions of app_rxfax and app_txfax for
1.4. Takes some messing around with the 1.4 build system to get them
included but it worked for me last night. Those apps can be found here:

http://www.soft-switch.org/downloads/snapshots/spandsp/test-apps-asterisk-1.4/

From reading this list it seems you are better off using iaxmodem and
Hylafax (I guess that it assuming the fax comes in via TDM on the
Asterisk box). Or check out OpenPBX.org as they have done much work on
T.38 support (visit irc channel #openpbx on freenode.net to talk about
the current status).

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Patrick

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