[asterisk-users] Upgrade to Asterisk 1.4 - it's one year's old!

[Rob Hillis]

One of the biggest barriers to upgrading are the number of little
"gotchas" in syntax changes that can make an upgrade from 1.2 to 1.4
quite painful.  After the pain I went through upgrading to 1.4, I've
always been recommending to people to think twice about upgrading if 1.2
does what they require.

Many of the changes may have been seen as minor - one or two changes are
to be expected, but I ran into at least half a dozen - mostly variable
changes if I recall correctly - things such as deprecating CALLERIDNUM
in favour of CALLERID(num).  Some of the breakage was minor (e.g. loss
of caller ID processing) but some of them resulted in calls being
dropped in unpredictable places.

All I can say is with 1.6, if a change is made that causes something
that worked in 1.4 not to work in 1.6, please think twice, three times
or four times before making the change, or making the change in such a
way that it won't break dialplan stuff from 1.4.


Steve Totaro wrote:
> Johansson Olle E wrote:
>   
>> Friends in the Asterisk community,
>>
>> I'm kind of interested in the slow uptake of Asterisk 1.4. Between 1.2  
>> and 1.4 there's been a lot of
>> important development. New code cleanups, optimization, new functions.
>>
>> I realize that 1.4 at release time wasn't ready for release, but we've  
>> spent one year polishing it,
>> working hard with bug fixes. The 1.4 that is in distribution now is  
>> very different from the young
>> and immature product that was release before Christmas in 2006.  
>> Testing, testing, testing
>> and hard work from developers has changed this and the 1.4 personality  
>> is now much
>> more grown-up and mature :-)
>>
>> I wonder if there are any major obstacles for upgrading.
>>
>> - Bugs that are still open?
>> - Bugs that are not reported?
>> - Not enough reasons to upgrade, since 1.2 really works well
>> - Just a bad karma for 1.4
>>
>> When responding, remember that we don't add new features to 1.4 after  
>> release, so I'm
>> not looking for a wishlist - that's for the coming release. We need to  
>> make a released
>> product stable, not add new features and potential scary bugs.
>>
>> Success stories with 1.4 are also welcome. "Upgrading to 1.4 doubled  
>> our revenues
>> in a month and gave us 200% more quality in the voice channels" or  
>> "Asterisk 1.4
>> gave us more reliable pizza deliveries and also fixed the bad taste of  
>> the coffee in our
>> vending machine". Anything.
>>
>> Also, I would like input on what you consider the most important new  
>> feature in 1.4.
>> I will try to make a list based on the feedback. Feel free to send  
>> feedback to the
>> list or in a private e-mail to me directly.
>>
>> Let's make 1.4 the choice for everyone's PBX - from small home systems  
>> to large
>> scale carrier platforms!
>>
>> /Olle
>>
>> ---
>> * Olle E. Johansson - oej at edvina.net
>> * Asterisk Training http://edvina.net/training/
>>
>>   
>>     
> When Digium starts using 1.4 in ABE then I would consider using it in a 
> production environment.  All I ever hear is "soon", and I have heard 
> that for months if not the whole year.  Until Digium itself is 
> comfortable selling and supporting this version, then neither am I.
>
> Thanks,
> Steve Totaro
>
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