[Asterisk-Users] Re: [Asterisk-Dev] benevolent dictatorship, or inclusive developper community?

[Greg Boehnlein]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2004 asterisk at lists.styx.org wrote:

> > No, it's time to get more people helping.  We *do* have a structure to
> > Asterisk development that involves external help but what tends to happen
> > is that people only care about their one bug or feature and as soon as
> > that's taken care of, they lose interest in doing the hard work and effort
> > it takes to process bug reports and feature requests. Only Brian West has
> > really stuck with the task, and he definitely will need some help.  If you
> > want to help, talk to Brian and he'll get you all the info you need.
> 
> Yes, I agree, Brian has done a lot of very good work and is a great
> boon to the Asterisk community. But from my experience, what I can see
> happening is, someone writes a patch and has to spend so long pestering
> you to get the patch imported into CVS that repeating the experience
> begins to seem a waste of time. So they lose interest.
> 
> As well, if CVS code comes with no guarantees, and people are strongly
> warned to run the stable snapshots in production, letting more than one
> single person commit changes becomes less of a problem. If someone commits
> something that's wrong, just take it out. No harm done. It moves the
> dialogue of the development team into the source code where it should be
> and out of IRC, which has its place but is not where everyone wants to
> spend their time.

While I don't want to jump into the middle of this discussion and piss 
anyone off, there are some points in this thread that I (as a user 
AND a developer) agree with. At some point, no matter what bugs exist in 
the code, a "stable" release candidate has to be 
dropped and the development branch must be forked. Asterisk is one of the 
only projects that I have come accross that does not seem to have a stable 
release candidate out in the wild. The latest Asterisk .deb file for 
Debian is like 0.5.0 something.. ;)

Think about the Linux Kernel, Apache, Sendmail or any of the other large 
Open Source projects, and you have two distinct communities; Developers 
and End Users. The Developers tend to work on the CVS tree and drop 
release versions (Release early, release often, patch quickly) while the 
End Users tend to go with the stable releases. At some point, a code 
freeze and feature freeze is called on the Development branch and the 
developers go into a Bug Fixing fenzy, focusing their efforts on fixing 
issues in the software before release. Invariably, this does not fix all 
bugs, but it addresses the major ones that people complain about it.

I'm not knocking in any way, the method that Asterisk uses for 
development. I personally, am happy to use a CVS version.... But at some 
point, if Asterisk is to reach the masses, it will need to have a Stable 
release that can be picked up by the various distros and pre-packaged.

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