Ms. Rabbit:
It is a perfectly acceptable thing to request, to ask the community to provide fixes for a community supported project. At the risk of putting words in @cynjut’s mouth, perhaps he feels that your request should have explicitly acknowledged that you are also part of the community, and that in making the request, there is an implicit expectation that you will assist in the process, in whatever form you can. This is conventionally done by providing code or financial contributions to those who can code. I am absolutely not telling you to do or pay anything, merely pointing out how the process has worked successfully on other community supported modules.
The problem with this request (and the OSS EPM module generally) is twofold:
- There is a vanishingly small number of coders with FreePBX module experience, and of the very few that have worked on this module, it seems burnout is inevitable due the the never ending maintenance required. A provisioning module needs to stay current with the device market, which is constantly introducing new products and firm wares. At present, of the 7 billion or so potential contributors, there is a single consistent contributor to the OSS EPM project, and I don’t know if their English skills allow for participation in this forum.
- There is a non-free (but modestly priced) module that actually does provision phones, does it well, is actively maintained, and is very widely used. The OSS module predates the Commercial module by years, and the market has absolutely spoken, the verdict being that support, functionality and features are more important than free.
If you want to get a sense of the amount of maintenance required for a provisioning module, use some search filters in the issue tracker. I filtered for tickets for the FreePBX and FreePBX Contributed projects. For the entire FreePBX project, over the last two years, there have been about 5000* tickets created, and 900 of these tickets are for commercial EPM alone. This is during a time interval when version 13 was going through alpha and beta, so the ticket count is probably skewed for that, and even then commercial EPM accounts for about 18% of all tickets created. Of the 906** EPM tickets created over the last 2 years, 223 are of type feature request and improvement, meaning a quarter of EPM tickets opened are user requests for new functionality and, interestingly, half of those requests have been closed with a resolution of fixed. It would take a volunteer team of dozens with competent and busy leader to bring the OSS version in line with what is provided by the Commercial version. Those few of us who have actually maintained community supported FreePBX modules, know that these dozens just don’t exist. Periodically one sees efforts to revive the project, and they inevitably come to naught because of these realities.
* 5000 is the raw number of tickets created. This number should be reduced by significant fraction due to the number of tickets created that are deemed to be support requests which don’t belong in the issue tracker and are immediately closed. If this reality were factored into the stats, I suspect the percentage of EPM tickets would climb to over 20%.
** fun fact, I have personally opened 73 of the 906 EPM tickets, you’re welcome Luke.