[asterisk-dev] Release schedule ?

[Leif Madsen]

On Tuesday 14 November 2006 19:01, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> John Lange wrote:
> > Or does that kind of quick release cycle just make people angry because
> > they have to upgrade too often or risk falling woefully behind?
>
> This is another issue that was brought to my attention when I discussed
> the situation with a few people at Astricon a couple of weeks ago.
>
> Many people are 3-6 months behind on 1.2 updates (in spite of security
> fixes, or they backport only those fixes), and there are still a lot of
> people running 1.0.x. The release of 1.4 is not going to cause people to
> immediately upgrade, and in fact as the installed base grows, the
> percentage of installations running 'old' (pick your definition)
> releases is going to increase.
>
> Making 'major' releases every six months will only serve to put more
> pressure on resellers, integrators, etc. who have to figure out how to
> update the systems they maintain... more food for thought, anyway :-)

I think this is where the SVN community project can really come into play to 
help. I personally have been running the latest version of func_odbc and 
app_stack from the SVN community site on my 1.2.x version of Asterisk. It is 
not difficult for me as a user to grab the code, compile it, test it, and 
offer feedback about it's functionality, while being able to maintain my set 
of "knowns" on the 1.2 branch, while testing and offering feedback on 
features that might not be released for one or two major versions.

I know this comes at a cost on the development side in terms of overhead, and 
I don't think that all features make sense to release there. However, if the 
code is relatively independent of the base, then I think it might be an 
avenue worth exploring.

I personally haven't had a lot of time to test the 1.4 branch since it was 
released, however I believe I have been able to contribute some useful 
feedback and testing on features that will be in 1.4 or 1.6. And as you 
mention, we're probably going to see larger bases of older releases being run 
in production, and if some of these features can be run in the labs of 
people, then those features will hopefully already be well tested even before 
a beta branch is created.

Leif Madsen.