[asterisk-users] How long will Asterisk 1.4.x supported/maintained

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 07:46:10PM +0100, Philipp Kempgen wrote:
> Tilghman Lesher schrieb:
> > On Thursday 13 November 2008 08:16:42 Klaus Darilion wrote:
> >> Is there somewhere a statement from Digium how long they will support
> >> Asterisk 1.4?
> > 
> > There is no statement, because we haven't even discussed when the EOL for
> > 1.4 will be reached.  Certainly that means it won't happen for at least the
> > next 60 days, but beyond that, I really don't know.
> 
> For the average non-techie user who does not want to compile
> themselves that may sound funny (if not scary).
> 
> When Debian Lenny (featuring Asterisk 1.4) is finally going to be
> released that version might not even be supported any more.

Debian Lenny was frozen at July, and thus had 1.4.21.2 .

> 
> Does that indicate Debian (don't really know about other distros)
> is too slow?

Debian freezes Asterisk for 1.5-2 years.

> Does it mean the development goes "too fast"?

When you install a PBX, do you keep it up-to-date with latest version of
Asterisk? OR do you freeze it at some point?

> Is it a problem with VoIP in general?
> Does it mean there is no point for a distro to provide VoIP
> packages because if you want roughly the version everybody else
> is using you will have to compile it anyway?

We're already working on 1.6 packages (they're basically working, but I
have to figure out a saner way with the configuration files).

One potential way is to use backports. We try to make sure that the
Asterisk packages are at always buildable on the Stable platform
(through the backport script). This is far from providing QA, but at
least it reduces the barrier of participation for others.


I don't have good answers here. It's also not clear to me how things
will work out with the 1.6.x branches. Those seem to be modeled after
the kernel, but that model of the Linux kernel works well because most
people use distor kernel (which means that the distros do most of the
QA), and those distributions actively participate in the development 
process and push fixes upstream.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
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