[asterisk-dev] About asterisk development plans

[Jon Bonilla (Manwe)]

El Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:58:19 +0100
"Olle E. Johansson" <oej at edvina.net> escribió:


Hi Olle. Thanks for your answer

> 
> It may be an issue of priorities too. Maybe we can implement some  
> system to
> help Leif Madsen prioritize among the bugs. Bugs that I feel are  
> critical, like
> the early media audio from PRI links, may be unimportant for you. For  
> me it's
> a showstopper. You might have something else. How should this be
> handled?
> 

I'll try to explain a little more but is not what issues do you focus on. Is
about focusing on issues.

> Is there any way we can get the community to contribute a bit more?
> I can't spend any time on bug fixing in the SIP channel at this time,  
> since
> there's simply no company or group of companies that funds this work.
> I feel really bad about it, as there are a large amount of SIP bugs in  
> the
> bug tracker that really needs attention. Leif keeps asking for help, I  
> keep
> promising but have a hard time fulfilling it. At the end of the month,  
> one needs
> a salary. It's as simple as that.

Nothing new. Everybody knows what you think :)


> I personally think that the new release policy makes 1.6 impossible to  
> use
> in any production environment. I've said that many times, so it's not  
> any news
> for any one. I'm maintaining a private version of Asterisk 1.4 for my  
> carrier
> customers with backports of smaller changes in the 1.6 branch (all  
> available
> in my svn directory). The cost of evaluating a new version is high and  
> 1.6
> release policy is not acceptable, since the core keep changing too fast.
>

That's a point. It is not expected Asterisk 1.6 to be suitable for production
environments. 

You say that you have a private 1.4 branch. So do I since I can't risk to
upgrade my production systems when a new version is released. Only my test
machines run new version of asterisk. But is that desirable? I don't think so
and not because the amount of time and cost of doing that but because the
consecuences to the Asterisk community. Let me explain a little better with my
poor English:

Asterisk needs the community to do betatesting and bug reporting. If the
community does not install new releases of asterisk because they are more
unstable, the community gets smaller as time goes by. That would cause new
releases to be less tested and... retrofeedback is the word? 

Until Asterisk 1.4.17 upgrading was painless more or less. From that on people
stayed in those versions or begun to backport their own patches because 1.4.2X
versions were becoming unusable.

 

>Large scale carrier installations is  not
> within Digium's commercial focus today.


Not in my mind saying to Digium what its commercial focus should be. But I
think they have created a market, community and ecosystem around Asterisk as
company PBX and they have a responsability with that creation. Asterisk should
be suitable for that purposes.



> We do need the community to step in and work on this alongside with  
> Digium.
> We need the community to take a more active role in managing Asterisk  
> and not
> leave it to Digium. Digium is doing more than their share. Asterisk  
> needs the
> community taking responsibility.
> 

The community has a responsability with the project. But not only betatesting
it but also pointing things that thinks goes wrong. I am community and I am
making my contribution to the project.

Community has it's work, but Digium has the lidership of the project. Many
people can patch app_macro and fix a bug and post it in the tracker but how
many people is capable of patching pbx.c or channel.c?

You say and I have heard more times that Asterisk is very difficult to mantain.
But going forward with this policy won't it become more and more difficult?
More and more things over the same basis would become more stable?

Should the project stop a little bit and focus on rewriting the basis and make
it more mantainable over the time?

I am afraid that in middle term the project will be unmantainable, that it will
begin loosing marked instead of growing because of its inestability.

We are talking about telephony. It is a critical 24/7 service in every company.
It should be bulletproof more than any other service. Shouldn`t be stability
the main goal of the project?


> 
> PS: For CDR's, there's a very good developer available, Steve Murphy,
> who has asked for support for his work on the asterisk-biz mailing list.
> If you want CDR to be worked on, contact him and make an arrangement.
> The more sponsors that steps in, the cheaper it will get for everyone.
> 


I am talking with some companies in my country about that. I hope Steve will
have more luck than you searching funds :-/


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Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
**Then you win.**

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