Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Menuselect

In the 1.4.0 version of Asterisk and its related packages, a new build system, autoconf, was implemented. This has changed the build process slightly, but has given more flexibilty to control what modules are being built at build time. This has an advantage in that we only have to build the modules we want and need instead of building everything.

Along with the new build system, a new menu-based selection system was introduced, courtesy of Russell Bryant. This new system permits a finer-grained selection to which modules are built before compiling the software and no longer requires the user to edit Makefiles. So instead of discussing how to use menuselect in every “Compiling ...” section, we will discuss it here, so when you see make menuselect you will understand what to do once inside the menuselect configuration screen.

In Figure 3-1, we see the opening menuselect screen for the Asterisk software. Other packages will look extremely similar, but with less options. We can navigate up and down the list using the arrow keys. We can select one of the menu options by pressing Enter or by using the right arrow key. The left arrow key can be used to go back.

Figure 3-1. Sample menuselect screen

Figure 3-2 shows a list of possible dialplan applications that can be built for use in Asterisk. Modules to be built are marked as [*]. A module is marked as not being built by [ ]. Modules ...