[asterisk-dev] Release Schedules and plans for Asterisk 1.8

[Olle E. Johansson]

Russell,

Thank you for finally moving ahead. You could have been more clear about why you waited, since you now made it clear that you waited until after 1.6.2 release. If that was clear, there would be less Swedish frustration.

There's a lot of "I"s in your mail. You are putting more and more responsibility on yourself. That's not a good solution in an open source project. Mark, and then Kevin, worked in the opposit direction, expanding the team, expanding each developer's responsibility. We should be careful not to go backwards here, so that all of Asterisk development and all decisions rest on one single person. That is not beneficial for the project, nor is it good for yourself and your workload. Also, instead of writing "I" you should propably use the name of your current role in policy documents and separate what Russell wants to do and what the project leader should do - and make that distinction very clear to the community.

While it's easy to go back in time and say "it was better before", I feel we should try to change direction and go back to try to make Asterisk a more community driven project. We should stimulate discussion now about 1.8 and what should be in it, not go out and say somthing like - "please don't add to the list of features which means that the release will slip in time". 1.8 is meant to be a long term release, which is a decision that was made yesterday. Before freezing it, we should have an open and generous discussion - we will be stuck with it for many years. During the 9 months of trunk development, we did not know that this was the case. Please don't start with this attitude and let's have a product management discussion - let's try to define the new version of Asterisk and then go backwards and set a release schedule for it when we have the definition, the committment behind what's in there and the process to move ahead.

If possible, I suggest an Astridevcon very soon to set a plan for 1.8. We did not have one at Astricon, so it's high time to have a management meeting for the project.

/O