Reorganize Channel Variables Catalog in documentation structure

[occamsoss]

I noticed that the "Channel Variables Catalog" is only located under the "Variables" tab on the FreeSWITCH docs homepage. Is there a reason why it's not grouped among the rest of the docs? If not, I think it can be reorganized among the broader documentation, currently under "FreeSWITCH Explained."

[boteman]

There were at least 2 attempts way back in the wiki days to catalog all the channel variables, but those pages were abandoned, leaving behind incomplete pages. There is a good chance that one or more are outdated and should be vetted against a current list.

A similar thing happened with a discussion of the dialplan, sadly.

[voughtdq]

I noticed that the "Channel Variables Catalog" is only located under the "Variables" tab on the FreeSWITCH docs homepage. Is there a reason why it's not grouped among the rest of the docs? If not, I think it can be reorganized among the broader documentation, currently under "FreeSWITCH Explained."

It is a hold over from the Confluence documentation system I believe. The variables were in their own Confluence space. Confluence had a way to include one page's contents in another page. The idea was to have a centralized place to edit the variables (with each variable on its own page), then have those changes propagate to wherever they would be referenced in the main documentation. The example of this is the "Variables Master List", which was just a list of inclusions of all the variables from the Variable Catalog Space. There was also an attempt to do the same inclusions on the module pages. I think maybe mod_fifo has it?

I still think it's a pretty good idea to basically have the variables tracked as data and programmatically build the variable docs form that. It would allow for the usages and examples to be tested before a release as well.

There are a few quirks with the original, though. The variable "data types" are very rough and often very wrong!!