No subject

Zaptel within 48 hours of their release. People are asking us all of the
time when a certain bug fix is going to be released. Since I don't make the
distro either, when the distro gets released, someone will ask me to install
it on their machine. The distro makers are the ones that spend the 24 to 48
hours testing their update mechanisms. They don't really test asterisk.

I don't think that it is that large of a task to employ some sort of beta
release system here. We expect that each release would be more stable than
the last. I should be able to grab 2 or 3 "dot" numbers back and get less
features for more stability, or just less features. That certainly won't be
the case when the little bugs that have popped up recently are fixed. If the
maintainers of the project can push a testing release, then the distros will
follow suit, and the end user experience should be much better.

I had no idea before I started this thread that there were so many people
VERY afraid of updating when new releases came out. I didn't think that
there would be damage control from Digium. I admire the people who maintain
this project and contribute to it. I've never backed the also-rans. I've
been through several of these technology trends, but this one would be over
for me is this project fails. Obviously I don't think it will since I'm
betting on this horse. 

Digium just can't call someone a troll that asks for a little heads up time
before a release and that offers resources for testing. The end user
experience needs to be the goal here.

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Russell Bryant
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 9:53 AM
To: Asterisk Developers Mailing List
Subject: Re: [asterisk-dev] Unstable releases lately

Bob wrote:
> This fails to answer what the release process is.
> 
> I'm actually offering some test facilities here if I knew what to test.

If only it were that easy.  Test facilities are not the issue.  Knowing what
to 
test is.  There is no obvious answer to that question given that Asterisk is
a 
generic telephony toolkit, not necessarily intended for any specific
purpose.

Testing of anything is useful.  Specifically, testing of the things that
matter 
most to you makes the most sense.

> I was under the impression that kpfleming made all of the svn additions to
> the release tags at svn.digium. It only makes sense that there would be a
> central location for this resource. I was not implying that it was his
> decision. I was implying that he has a big red button on his desk that
says
> release that he pushes when certain factors were present.

Actually, the button is on my desk.  :)  It's more orange than red, though
...

> I actually do have a factual basis and that is simply a very noticeable
> increase in my customer support tickets. Digium's paid support must be
> booming. My free support is. My current advice is to roll back to 1.4.13
and
> see if that fixes your problems. The topics that lead off the list are the
> PRI deadlocks and the SIP bugs that are labeled DTMF in mantis. Sorry if I
> cannot divulge my support numbers, but all that one needs to do is to
check
> out many of the asterisk support forums to confirm this.

Open source releases have nothing to do with Digium's paid support.  Digium
only 
offers support for the commercial version of Asterisk (Business Edition).
ABE 
is where all of our company test resources are focused.  While it is the
same 
code, plus some closed-source modules due to licensing of 3rd party software
or 
patents, ABE releases stay intentionally behind a bit, so that we have time
for 
testing and so forth.

Also, I would encourage you to read the ChangeLogs to look for mentions of 
issues that you have seen.  If you had read the ChangeLog, you would know
who 
makes the releases ...

> I'm neither a contributor nor a seller of asterisk. I provide support to
my
> customers as a common courtesy. I support Linux and BSD as well by
> association.
> 
> How does the tag become a branch? Who approves it? I cannot test the 1.4
> branch every day. I have 3 or 4 people on hand that can test release
> candidates. Where are they?

I approve releases.  We make them when the branch seems to be in a good
state. 
That is, we have not introduced any invasive bug fixes very recently, and
there 
have not been any new serious bug reports reported against it recently.

The 1.4 branch is always a release candidate, by definition.  When we make 
changes to 1.4, they are only for bug fixes.  Of course, sometimes those
fixes 
introduce regressions, and we fix them as soon as we find them or as they
are 
reported.  There are a ton of people that run the code straight from the 1.4

branch.  Some update constantly, daily, weekly, whatever, and are very good 
about reporting their issues.

-- 
Russell Bryant
Senior Software Engineer
Open Source Team Lead
Digium, Inc.

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