[asterisk-dev] merge policies, supported branches, API/ABI freeze (was Re: Asterisk 1.6 Release Management Proposal)

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Russell Bryant wrote:

> As has been pointed out in other parts of this thread, trunk should always be
> usable.  It may have a few rough edges, which I am hoping that the 1.6 process
> will help alleviate.  I essentially want 1.6.X releases to be release-worthy
> snapshots of trunk.  Take a snapshot of trunk, get a bunch of people to test for
> rough edges introduced in the last month or two of merging new things, and
> release it.  I don't want to impose anything that will hinder development on 1.6
> quite yet.

I would echo Russell's statements here, along with adding another one:

While Asterisk has 'matured' to some extent, at least in terms of basic
feature set, protocol support, etc., internally it has a long way to
go... there are core data structures that need to be redesigned, thread
handling improvements, and other significant changes that while they
would not result in user-visible functionality differences, they are
important for improving Asterisk. One of the reasons we want to move to
this sort of development/release model is so that we can be free to make
these sorts of improvements and not have to keep them stuck in a
development branch for 12 months or more.

To that end, I think maintaining ABI stability is out of the question at
this point; most users who will be installing releases of Asterisk
produced under this model will be building Asterisk from source, and
they can drop in (or replace) individual modules if they need to do so.

Maintaining API compatibility is a bigger issue; I think we are still at
the point where we need to be able to improve the API when it is the
right thing to do, but that means that people maintaining out-of-tree
modules will have to 'keep pace' with those changes. This new release
model means that they could have to make changes more frequently than
once per major release, so it is important that as part of this change
we do a very good job both justifying and documenting API changes
between minor releases.

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Director of Software Technologies
Digium, Inc. - "The Genuine Asterisk Experience" (TM)