[asterisk-dev] Release schedule ?

[Luigi Rizzo]

[I apologize if the info is available somewhere but i could not
find it on www.asterisk.org nor google gave any useful result.]

    [This email is addressed to whoever decides on the release process
    for asterisk - i am unclear if this is (as i hope) a "release
    engineering team" as in other projects i am involved in, or it is
    a "community decision".]
 
I would like to know what is the planned schedule for 1.4.0,
so that developers like me could know how to focus their work within
their available time.

It seems that the beta period has been going on for a very long time,
yet not having a deadline for the release makes it very hard to
organize work.

Obviously there are known and unknown bugs in 1.4 as in every piece of
software, so there it would be unreasonable to release 1.4.0 when it
is free of known bugs.
Obviously we would like to fix the most critical bugs, but some of
them may take a long time to find a fix.  In some other cases, the
code in trunk is clean, but backporting it would also carry in some
extra features, and this may be against some policies (if i remember
well, "no new features in 1.4" was declared some 5-6 months ago).

On the other hand, the code has undergone some significant changes
in recent times (new loader, completely new build scheme, the recent
cli format debate, etc.) so it would be unreasonable for users to
think that 1.4 has the stability of an even-numbered release.

Given the above, and the relatively small number of active developers,
one cannot expect me or other developers to have time to work on
different sets of fixes, one for trunk (with relative freedom on
new features), one for 1.4 (with the new-feature ban).

With the above in mind, I would suggest the following:

 - settle on a very short deadline (e.g. 1-2 weeks, really no more)
   for getting 1.4.0 out, possibly with a notice to users on the
   "stability" of the release.
   This would let developers find some motivation to work on critical
   issues for getting 1.4.0 out.
 - lift the 'no new features' ban for 1.4.1, so developers could backport
   fixes and backward-compatible features from trunk without wasting
   the extra time to remove the 'new features' part (something that
   could discourage even trying to backport the fixes);
 - schedule 1.4.1 (or 1.4.2 if you like) for end of january to get
   a more stable release in this branch.

Please don't be upset by the idea that 1.4.0 may be not the greatest
asterisk release ever. This happens for many pieces of software.

	cheers
	luigi