[Asterisk-Dev] Asterisk Maintenance Crew

[russelb at CLEMSON.EDU]

Hello everyone!

Since the release of Asterisk 1.0, I have been maintaining the stable
branch of Asterisk, zaptel, and libpri.  I am very excited that I have
been able to contribute to the project by making stable bug-fix releases
so that CVS head can be developed more aggressively.  However, since the
two trees have grown apart so much, I have to do almost every patch by
hand.  I have been thinking of some ways that this type of maintenance
work could be done more efficiently.

I would like to start a development group that will take on various
maintenance tasks for Asterisk.

The number one job of this group would be to help port bug fixes to the
stable branch.  Patches that still need to be reviewed for addition to 1.0
are the ones marked resolved (not yet closed) on the bug tracker.

Aside from that, there are some other things that this group could do. 
This group could maintain a development to-do list for known issues that
aren't necessarily bugs, but that could be worked on to improve the
project.  Some examples of this are converting all modules to use the flag
macros to reduce memory usage, ensuring the use of the linked list macros,
or fixing code formatting to conform to the coding guidelines.

Since there has been a lot of discussion about feature requests lately,
this group could also maintain a list of feature requests that do not yet
have patches.  The web site that contains all of this information could
become the central repository for information on projects that could be
taken up by people looking for something to do on a rainy day, or for
those wishing to get into Asterisk development.  It could be a sort of a
feature request proxy instead of having them directly posted to the bug
tracker.

A couple more projects for this group could be improving doxygen
documentation throughout the code and starting an Asterisk developers
guide in conjunction with the Asterisk documentation project
(www.asteriskdocs.org).

I know there are a lot of amateur programmers out there that would like to
contribute to Asterisk.  I would like to give them that chance.  There is
a lot of "mundane" programming that is very beneficial to the project that
would also provide a means of learning about Asterisk development and
improving programming skills.

I would like to hear some thoughts about this and how it could best be
organized.  Thanks for taking the time to consider my thoughts.

Russell Bryant