> Furthermore, even if you assumed that spandsp was as stable as HylaFAX, > there is a vast feature-set difference between them as far as the > faxing itself goes. Steve has already made it clear that he sees no > future in fax, and that he does not intend to bridge that feature-set > gap at all.
I'd like to amplify that, and make at least one serious comment on this thread. First of all, the fact that fax isn't rocket science has led all manner of goofballs to engineer devices that take great liberty with the standards, ... and that fail in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. The low barrier to entry, combined with the ubiquity of fax technology, means that any _industrial_ fax application needs an extremely robust T.30 engine at its core if it's going to be taken seriously. There's just SO MUCH CRAP to contend with out there. Fact: fax is easy to do poorly, and difficult to do extremely well I know what you're going to say ... my $75 toshiba fax machine does it well, it can't be hard! That may be true, but consider how many people, how much R&D and how much intellectual property is tied up in their fax T.30 engine, and you can see there's a reason desktop fax machines generally fax much more reliably than, for instance, faxmodems (which are generally crap). Spandsp's rxfax and txfax could one day be suitable for mission-critical use (even if they _do_ have the capability to take down asterisk), but today they're not quite there. I certainly would not base a business on this technology. It's a very cool tool for hobbyists right now .. .a classroom exercise on how to do faxing from first principles and a way to illustrate the power of a much more generally useful technology, namely spandsp itself which is, quite simply, awe inspiring. As Lee has highlighted, the author does not plan to flesh out the fax implementation. If our customers were to implement spandsp many of them would be facing monthly phone bills that are _thousands_ of dollars higher than what they're presently paying thanks to the superior feature set in dedicated Eicon and Brooktrout fax boards, or even in HylaFAX's own Class 1 implementation. Anyone who has studied the economics of faxing will know that the up-front cost generally pales in comparison to the ongoing cost of telco charges and administrative headaches if lots of faxes are failing. Sure, HylaFAX itself if a wonderful platform for mission-critical or enterprise faxing. It also has a very robust scheduler which is highly configurable, that scales well (we routinely send batches of a half-million faxes with no problems at all), and it generally does everything you could ever want a fax system to do, with the lots of hooks for anything more ... eccentric. But features and functionality are only worth something if you need them, and as some people have rightly pointed out, some people don't need anything more than fax reception, PDF conversion, and mailing. To those people who then conclude spandsp is the right way to go, I say you're missing the point - you need to look much deeper into the heart of the matter. How good are txfax and rxfax at coping with real-world fax freakishness? Personally, I think it's a shame spandsp's author doesn't think fax is sexy like we do. -The Undertaker -- Darren Nickerson Senior Sales & Support Engineer iFax Solutions, Inc. www.ifax.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1.215.438.4638 +1.215.243.8335 (fax) _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users