[asterisk-dev] Asterisk Release Schedule

[Faidon Liambotis]

Hi,

Russell Bryant wrote:
>                           4. Release Schedule
> 
>    The following table shows the release schedule for all existing
>    Asterisk releases, as well as the schedule for the next planned
>    release.
This is a quite late response but I see that it's still under discussion
in Astricon. Here are some points from a distributors PoV:

* Generally, it looks good. It puts an end to the whole 1.6.n.m-rcK
  insanity and provides LTS releases. That sounds great, thanks!

* What should a distributor do if he wants to ship something now or in a
  3-6 month timeframe? For example, there was a plan of a Debian
  "full-freeze" by the end of the year (fortunately abandoned).

  According to the plan, everything that's current or
  soon-to-be-released (i.e. up to 1.6.2) will be EoLed in 2 years at
  most.

  Essentially, right now you're not providing an LTS /at all/. There's
  not even an estimate for a release date for 1.8.

  This leaves us essentially unsupported for the better part of the
  release cycle of our next version, whether we ship 1.4 or 1.6.2.

  Perhaps 1.6.2 should be made LTS instead? Or 1.8.x should get released
  really soon?

* I see no mention of API or ABI constraints. We currently ship a number
  of out-of-tree modules, like -addons (merged in 1.8), spandsp (merged
  in 1.6) and chan-capi (not merged). Breaking the ABI, means silently
  breaking these packages, forcing us to rebuild them and adding weird
  package dependency structures to force a package upgrade.

  It'd be nice to have a fixed external module ABI across a so called
  "release series".

Thanks,
Faidon