[asterisk-dev] Release schedule ?

[Greg Boehnlein]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2006, Luigi Rizzo wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 01:20:36PM +0100, Johansson Olle E wrote:
> > >>
> > >> I also suggest postponing any discussion about release procedures and
> > >> stick to what we have and focus on the bug tracker.
> > >
> > > and that was the first part (and the subject) of my mail.
> > >
> > > 	Is there a release schedule at all ?
> > 
> > We are many months behind the schedule, so I think the current
> > schedule is "when we have fixed all known and fixable bugs".
> > Let's focus on the bug tracker, all of us. Now.
> 
> ok that's not a schedule.
> 
> you are welcome to consider this discussion a waste of time,
> but it is a commonly accepted concept that in order to make
> things happen, there need to be reasonable and achievable deadlines,
> so that there is a chance that people may convince themselves
> (as that's the only way in a volunteer project) to address it.
> 
> "now" is not reasonable - too early.
> "when we have fixed all known and fixable bugs" is not achievable;
> the list grows with time.

I agree. There is never a time when a piece of software is perfect. I also 
agree there deadlines are good things that help prioritize and focus work. 
It is to be expected that any .0 release should have a basic, expected 
level of functionality. From the community perspective, this does not seem 
to be well documented. I.E. what are the specific, measurable tests that a 
release must achieve to be qualified for release? At Astricon, my initial 
requests for regression testing in the Developer's conference met with 
interest from only a few people, and consequently it got dropped off the 
agenda in favor of other topics. Mark made the comment "Testing.. isn't 
that what a user base is for?". Obviously, he was joking, but I'm sure 
that many developers feel that way. They are in it for the thrill of the 
hunt.. writing new code.. they don't want to spend a lot of time debugging 
things and going through the heavy lifting and insanity of support. In one 
respect, I think that is great.. you have to have brilliant people to turn 
ideas into code. On the other hand, the great unsung heroes of Asterisk 
are the legions of people that contribute to fixing bugs, improving 
compatibility and  stability. In many cases, we forget about all the work 
that these people do.

In that respect, I was extremely excited about the fact that Digium, as 
shepards of Asterisk, have recognized and committed resources to 
maintaining the bug tracker. This is a departure from the past, and is 
an important change in mentality that needs to be supported and recognized 
by the community. We, as a community, need to help ourselves by helping 
Digium. Imagine what we could do if everyone on this list chose one bug on 
the bug-tracker to review and attempt to fix!

I can honestly say, that in the past few months, I have seen a large 
increase in the number of commits to 1.4. For my needs, it is very close 
to meeting the base level of stability that I need to put a few 
"production test cases" into play. VLDTMF has passed Interop Testing with 
all of my carriers, and once some of the T.38 pass through issues are 
addressed, I'll be putting it into limited production for a small subset 
of my customers.

In once sense, I'd rather have software that takes longer, but is 
thoroughly tested in my environment, over software that is pushed out the 
door because of an artifical deadline. As the old saying goes "We will 
sell no wine before its time". I believe that Asterisk 1.4 will never have 
all bugs fixed, but I believe that we can try to fix as many as we can by 
focusing our energies on thorough testing and by developing a set of 
criteria that we (as a community) believe is important for a release.

I'd like Blitzrage to chime in at some point about the Asterisk regression 
testing that was thrown around in the Code Zone at Astricon. I think this 
will go a LONG way towards quickly finding, fixing and being SURE that 
Asterisk meets that certain basic level of functionality between releases!

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