Asterisk Goes Unicode On Stretch 2017-07-01

Today I upgraded my Asterisk server from Jessie to Stretch and before long I noticed that I could no longer type in the CLI for Asterisk. Well, I could type, but instead of showing me the characters I was typing, it was showing me the unicode codes like "\U+3665" which of course, didn't work when trying to assemble a command for Asterisk.

Mishka & Marigold looking for libedit2.

With a little search-engine-fu I found a post at superuser explaining that it is because of an incompatible libedit2. To get the Asterisk CLI working again I decided it would be best to downgrade my libedit2 like this:

Add this to the end of my /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ jessie main
deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ jessie main

... followed by:

# apt-get update

then:

# apt-cache policy libedit2

Which provides me with a list of available versions of libedit2. Then:

apt-get install libedit2=3.1-20140620-2

and finally:

systemctl restart asterisk.service

Frankly I am not convinced that mixing stretch and jessie in my sources.list is a good idea, but can't think of why it would break anything worse than the upgrade to stretch did. Would that technically be called "backpinning"? Anyways, if anyone has a better suggestion, feel free to click contact up top there and lemmie know.