[Asterisk-Announce] Asterisk Development and Release Cycle

[Asterisk Development Team]

Asterisk 1.2 was released over 1 year after Asterisk 1.0, which resulted
in many users trying to run the development version of Asterisk in a
production capacity so that they could take advantage of the new
features that had been added. This produced a flurry of extraneous bug
reports and caused extra work for the developers as they could not work
on changes that would actually cause disruption of the development tree.

In an effort to combat this problem, and to give the community a more
predictable release cycle, the process is being organized so that such a
long time between releases will never happen again.

Beginning in January of 2006, we will produce new major Asterisk
releases on a six month cycle.

The development cycle will be organized in this fashion:

MONTHS 1 - 3

The first three months of the development cycle are when the development
branch will be changed most drastically. The tree is open to large
architectural changes as well as new feature enhancements and bug fixes.

MONTHS 4 - 5

For the next two months, the development branch will no longer receive
architectural changes. New features that are ready to be merged will
still be accepted at this point.

MONTH 6

The last month is reserved for beta testing. No more features will be
accepted for the upcoming release. Beta releases will be made on a
weekly cycle, culminating in one (or two) release candidate releases
just before the final release.

Asterisk 1.4 is scheduled to be released in the beginning of July, 2006.
Once the release is made, a branch will be created. This branch will
then receive maintenance for bug fixes only. At that point, the
development cycle will start over to prepare for the next major release
of Asterisk, scheduled for January of 2007.

The Asterisk Development Team