[asterisk-dev] About asterisk development plans

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:32:34AM +0100, Jon Bonilla wrote:
> El Wed, 18 Mar 2009 10:45:02 +0200
> Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com> escribió:

> > Let's face it. Features are coming in fast. You use a software like
> > Asterisk because it is a wildcard. With the old model you had to wait
> > for over a year to get the latest developed feature in a "supported"
> > version. This means that:
> > 
> > 1. Those new features were not tested well enough
> > 2. You often had to run an unsupported version in production
> > 3. If your personal stabilization cycle missed Digium's one, you get an
> > extra delay of up to a year in getting new features.
> > 
> 

> Asterisk is already a wildcard. This is not the same project Marc Spencer
> begun. One you have features enough and you create a market and ecosystem
> around the product, your goals should be different.

You missed one small word here: "almost". It *almost* has all the
features I need. But I also need to fix some misbehaviour (the CDR
handling is a classic example of such), support interacting with some
new hardware, add a small feature. And then you come along and add your
little set of stabilization fixes. And Olle goes on to rewrite parts of 
chan_sip.

And before you know it, we have many changes.


That is not to say that better testing and such should not be applied,
where possible. From what I see work is done in that area but I'm not
exactly familiar with it. The point is that new features will come. If
you try to block them they'll just hang around in external patches and
make your production system both unsupportable and more difficult to
test.

> 
> 
> > 
> > I already see some distributions use Asterisk 1.6.0 . People already use
> > 1.6.0 in production. At some point in the future 1.6.3 will be relweased
> > and 1.6.0 will no longer be supported.
> 
> As you said that is "hearsay". I also know people that install 1.2 branch
> because 1.4 and 1.6 are not suitable form them.

1.2 has by now many more known issues than 1.4 and people still swear by
it. This is a combination of:

1. They learned to live with them, can afford the known downtime and
   troubles and don't want to risk potential issues at upgrade.

2. At the time the version they used was indeed more stable. This is the
   image they still have in their minds.

You want a more stable version: freeze your own. This will take some
digging into the tree and cherry-picking and adaptation of patches. And
require extra testing of your branch. But you clearly think it is
important. So why not just do it?

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
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http://www.xorcom.com  iax:guest at local.xorcom.com/tzafrir