[asterisk-dev] Thoughts on Asterisk release management

[Russell Bryant]

Mihai Balea wrote:
> You have to understand that Asterisk is a mature product.  A lot more
> people use it as a core revenue generator or as part of essential
> business infrastructure now than a few years ago, in the 1.0 and 1.2
> days.  These people will need massive incentives to assume the risk of
> moving to a new and unproven version - by incentives I mean compelling
> new features and a proven track of reliability.  Also, many people have
> been burned by the 1.4 upgrade, so they will think twice before
> attempting another one anytime soon.  So don't be surprised if the 1.5
> adoption will not b as wide as you hoped for.

Well, I think that this same group of people has an even bigger incentive to
help with the testing of the 1.5 release series.  It is to the benefit of any
organization that has a significant interest in Asterisk to test new versions to
help secure the future of Asterisk.  There are a lot of ways to contribute to
Asterisk development.  I know that there are a lot of organizations that make
direct revenue off of Asterisk based or related products, but do not have a good
way to contribute back to the project.  Devoting some testing effort to the 1.5
release series would be a great start.

For those that use Asterisk as a company phone system to support their business
which is completely unrelated, I don't expect this will mean much to them.  They
fall into the group that we will continue to try to please by having fairly long
release life cycles so that updating does not have to happen very often.
Hopefully we have already proven our dedication to this by maintaining Asterisk
1.0 and 1.2 for so long.  However, I certainly welcome the brave and willing in
this group to help with 1.5 testing as well!

-- 
Russell Bryant
Software Engineer
Digium, Inc.