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

[shadowym]

I do wish Digium or whoever tests this stuff had a more reliable way of
testing software releases rather than relying on feedback from the
community.  Fonality, for example use what they call a "hammer" which sounds
to me like a bunch of servers running various stress tests on the software
to try break it.

-----Original Message-----
From: Atis Lezdins [mailto:atis at iq-labs.net] 
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2007 6:59 AM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Upgrade to Asterisk 1.4 - it's one year's old!

On 12/15/07, Johansson Olle E <oej at edvina.net> 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!

We have switched to 1.4 some half year ago, and main motivation was some
stability issues with 1.2 (and few new features), so having 1.4 for us
means - we're actually having support - we can post bugs to Mantis, and
got them solved. Our migration is not yet completely over, last step is
getting rid of AgentCallbackLogin, that we plan to do in beginning of
next year.

However 1.4 since release have had some serious changes that blocked our
planned upgrades - for example some memory corruption that raised
between 1.4.10 and 1.4.12 that was very hard to track down. This shows
that having 1.4 in bugfix-only state is not actually working that good -
we have to test each new release very carefully.

In total 1.4 have helped us to get rid of twice-per-week crashes we
experienced on 1.2, so i would call it more stable than 1.2.

Regards,
Atis

-- 
Atis Lezdins
VoIP Developer,
IQ Labs Inc.
atis at iq-labs.net
Skype: atis.lezdins
Cell Phone: +371 28806004
Work phone: +1 800 7502835