[asterisk-biz] Res: Res: 2008 Predictions

[BJ Weschke]

Flavio Goncalves wrote:
> Dear Russell,
>  
> I´m not saying that Digium is not committing the bugs, because, it 
> does not want. I´m just predicting that we will keep applying patches 
> in the next year. Patches are being generated by several developers 
> and they are not being committed to older versions such as 1.2, 
> because, this is the the way it works (1.2 is froozen and not even bug 
> fixes are being done, as far as I know). The version 1.2 is still very 
> popular and very reliable, that´s the logic behind the prediction. I´m 
> sure, Digium is doing his best to make a great code available to the 
> community.
>  
 A tremendous amount of dev time has been spent in the latter half of 2007 making 1.4 'more stable and reliable' because at the developer's conference in mid-2007 it was determined that this is where the focus needed to be. I've noticed the improvements and a survey taken in another thread that happened recently seemed to indicate there were others that have as well. 
 There were other contributors that also noted areas of improvement that were still necessary to get 1.4 where we all want it to be, and work still continues in this direction. Many of the astobj2 conversions that happened in 1.4 happened because they were desperately needed to put in proper reference use counts around objects that needed to be protected because some thread somewhere was still using it resulting in crashes and mutex deadlocks. You need only subscribe to the svn-commits list to see all the activity that still occurs in the 1.4 branch. It's not limited just to security fixes.

 Digium has made a conscious decision to stop patch support on 1.2 in favor of focusing efforts around the active 'stable' branch and the active 'development' branch. The community members there at the time of the dev conference, myself being one of them, fully supported this move knowing that even with what Digium already provides there is a finite limit to the number of branches that can be supported at any given time and the line had to be drawn in the sand somewhere.

 That being said, this is an open source project. I don't believe there's anything at all that stops anyone out there from picking up where Digium and others have decided to "leave off" and fork the 1.2 branch to allow it to stay active with patches and move it forward.

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