[Asterisk-Dev] Asterisk 1.2 Release Plans

[Kevin P. Fleming]

As previously mentioned on the lists by Olle Johannson, we are actively 
trying to get Asterisk in shape for a 1.2 release within the next 60 
days. To accomplish this, we need a few things to happen:

1) A feature freeze - This will occur at the end of this month, with no 
new feature submissions accepted after July 31st. Any _pending_ feature 
patches in Mantis that have passed architecture review and functionality 
testing before August 1st can be accepted into 1.2, if they make it 
through the remainder of the review processes and are able to be merged 
before August 15th.

2) Progress on open bugs - There are a number of bugs open in Mantis 
that are waiting for the poster to provide additional information, test 
results, call traces, etc. We would much prefer to not release 1.2 with 
suspected problems already identified, but we cannot solve them without 
adequate input from you. If you have an open bug and are not in a 
position to continue providing assistance in solving it, please post a 
message to the mailing lists asking for volunteers to help replicate the 
problem so it can get resolved.

3) Testing - We need a _lot_ of help testing. If you have not previously 
tested CVS HEAD, please download it, read the UPGRADE.txt file and 
install it on one or more systems to play around with. Please do _not_ 
put it into a production environment unless you are willing to accept 
the consequences of that action. If you do find a bug or other issue, 
when you open a bug in Mantis, please try to provide _all_ the 
configuration information, call traces, etc. that the bug guidelines 
request, so that we don't waste 3-4 days just going back and forth 
requesting more information from you. If possible, join the #asterisk or 
#asterisk-dev IRC channel to find out exactly what debugging information 
will be required and how to produce it, if you don't already have that 
knowledge.

4) Release Candidates - I will produce the first release candidate on 
August 20th, with followup versions produced every week until we deem 
the release ready for public consumption. I expect it will require at 
least three -RC releases for us to get things in shape, so that means 
that 1.2 itself may be ready by September 15th.

We are very thankful for the community's help and support, and we want 
Asterisk 1.2 to be as important a release as 1.0 itself was. The number 
of new features, performance improvements, bug fixes and 
interoperability enhancements in CVS HEAD is astonishing, and a very 
large percentage of them came directly from community contributions. We 
hope that all of the 'non-developers' in the community will be able to 
help us 'shake out' the bugs and problems remaining in the code, so we 
can be assured of the most stable 1.2 release possible :-)