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

[Ron Arts]

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.
> 

Olle,

I can explain why *we* haven't upgraded our customers yet: fear and lack of necessity.

1. Fear of new bugs (as we encountered during the 1.2 lifecycle). It will
    be a *lot* of work to test any and all feature our customers use before we
    install it on their premises.
2. Fear that we will find out the hard way that the UPGRADE.txt file maybe was
    correct and complete when 1.4.0 came out, but is now lagging behind.
3. Fear that we will find out the hard way why Digium is not supporting it
    yet commercially.
4. I have been following all developer fixes since 1.4.0. Lately I have been
    too busy to read them, but there were - to my taste - far too many fixes
    for crashes or otherwise important bugs. I'll wait until the stream of
    fixes per month slows down to a trickle.
5. Lack of necessity. Not enough features that will convince our customers
    to pay for the upgrade.

Other people have mentioned the upgrade path. I can imagine that is an important
point as well, but not for us, as our customers can upgrade their system
with a yum upgrade. This saves our support people a lot of time, and thus
the customers a lot of money.

How can the uptake for 1.4 be improved? No it's not the bugs. I'd suggest
some marketing. Create a section on the website on the upgrade from 1.2 to 1.4
with:

- short list of most important features
- an extensive guaranteed-to-be-complete categorized list of all changes.
- some explanations on stability (I mean the amount and type of fixes that
   went into the releases since 1.4.0, and how it is dying down now)

And of course Digium could create a lot of trust by commercially supporting 1.4.

Thanks,
Ron Arts
NeoNova


> - 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
> 
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