[asterisk-dev] Unstable releases lately

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 09:24:57AM -0600, John Lange wrote:
> Back at Fall Von 2007, during the BOF session the topic of having a
> daily SVN snapshot available for download was raised and there seemed to
> be agreement that this was a good idea.
> 
> If you make it easier to get early releases more people will do so and
> hopefully more bugs will be found which might help improve stability.

If it is such a good idea, then why wait for Digium to implement it?

Start yourself.

I once posted here a nice script to grab the latest branch from the SVN
as a tarball and even deduce a version number for it that is freindly
for automated packaging. Will that help you?

For me personally grabbing the sources from SVN is convinient enough. I
would actually encourge testers to use an SVN copy rather than a
snapshot tarball, as it is easier to get patches from them, and updating
to a slightly newer snapshot takes much less time. This is another
reason why I don't really bother on snapshots. subversion is now
included in practically any distribution. If you have the tools to build
Asterisk, chances are that installing subversion would be much extra
pain.

(But then again: this is why I don't bother. Feel free to bother)

> 
> Taking things one step further; it would be nice if there were binary
> packages available from the main Asterisk web site that closely tracked
> the releases as well. Maybe even an SVN snapshot binary as well.

This will get you into a mess of binary compatibility, various platforms
and various build options.

Some of the modules in Asterisk are known to use C++, which tends to be
less ABI-compatible between various versions.

Various existing binary distributions today dodge this by targeting a
very specific platform.

I suspect that you'll have to convince people here by actually providing
packages and demonstrating that they are easier to install (and useful
enough for debug) than a source distribution.

By "easy to install, I also refer to answering the question: "which
specific set of files can I use on my Linux[0] distribution? What .so
files exactly should I load in the modules directory?

You'll probably have to automate the installation in a way, or resort to
a set of rpms / debs (or just prepare packages for your specific
platform, which is also fine).

Again, feel free to prove me a nagging naysayer.


[0] And what if I don't use Linux?

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               Tzafrir Cohen
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