[Asterisk-Dev] Asterisk Maintenance Crew

Jim Van Meggelen jim at vanmeggelen.ca
Mon Jan 3 11:25:11 MST 2005


asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com wrote:
> 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.

That is a very good idea.

> 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.

Could someone new to C be shown how to do this (assuming basic
linux/computer/network and general geek skills)?
 
> 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.

If properly suported and maintained, this could work well. Possibly a
system of voting on feature requests, and also a feedback forum of some
kind (possibly by "feature marshals", whose job it is to clarify what
exactly a feature request is trying to achieve, and thus quantify the
value to the community). If a feature gets a lot of votes and is
regarded as something that will be of benefit, then it has passed the
first stage and can be formally added to the feature request list. If a
feature does not gather any votes (or some minimum number of votes), it
will be removed from consideration (either erased completely, or
consigned to some dungeon). This will reduce the total number of
outstanding feature requests, and also ensure that those that do get
submitted have passed a sort of peer review process, and thus are not as
likely to be a waste of time.

> 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).

Currently theres a discussion about having a weekly seminar-type
conference call, where a member of the dev team hosts the call, and we
go over a piece of the code line-by-line (while someone from the doc
team adds documentation). That's looking pretty promising. The goal is
to not only to create a comprehensive information resource for those
looking to learn about the Asterisk code, but also to properly document
the sources. That might go even faster if more than one group of
developers/writers got involved. If we could get three developers and
three documentors to commit an hour per week to this, we'd document a
wealth of knowledge in no time flat.

So far we've got tentative commitments from:

Developers:
Brian K. West
Russell Bryant(?)

Documentors:
Leif Madsen
Jim Van Meggelen


> 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'd love to be able to contribute, but feel my C skills are not
sufficient.

> 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. 

You are on to something here, that's for sure. 

Count me in!

Cheers,

Jim.


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