[asterisk-users] Asterisk 1.4.22 and 1.6.0 Released

[Asterisk Development Team]

The Asterisk.org development team is proud to announce the releases of
Asterisk 1.4.22 and 1.6.0.

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=== Asterisk 1.4.22 =============================================
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Asterisk 1.4.22 includes a large number of bug fixes for the 1.4 release
series of Asterisk.  1.4.22 also includes support for DAHDI.  For more
information about the transition from Zaptel to DAHDI, please see the
following help file:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.4.22/Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt?view=markup


For a full listing of changes in this release, see the ChangeLog:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.4.22/ChangeLog?view=markup


Asterisk 1.4.22 is available for immediate download from the Digium
downloads site:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-1.4.22.tar.gz

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=== Asterisk 1.6.0 ==============================================
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Asterisk 1.6.0 is the first official release of Asterisk 1.6.

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--- Upgrade Information -----------------------------------------
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Asterisk 1.6 no longer supports Zaptel.  It only contains support for
DAHDI.  For more information on this transition, please see the
following help file:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0/Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt?view=markup

There are a number of other important changes to be aware of when
upgrading to Asterisk 1.6.0 from previous versions of Asterisk.  For a
listing of those things, please see UPGRADE.txt:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0/UPGRADE.txt?view=markup

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--- New Features ------------------------------------------------
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Asterisk 1.6.0 contains new features that were not previously available
in an Asterisk release.  For a full listing of the features that are
included in Asterisk 1.6.0, please see the CHANGES file:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0/CHANGES?view=markup

A verbose listing of each individual change that was made in the
development of Asterisk 1.6.0 is also available:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0/ChangeLog?view=markup

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--- Release Management ------------------------------------------
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The Asterisk.org development team has decided on a new release
management style for Asterisk 1.6.  Previously, a release series was
strictly feature frozen for its entire lifetime.  The release management
guidelines for Asterisk 1.6 were inspired by the Linux Kernel, among a
number of other projects.

Asterisk 1.6 is not feature frozen.  Features will be added in point
releases.  However, effort will be made to ensure that the number of
large changes is minimized in a single point release.  Even as 1.6.0 is
being released, the Asterisk development team is already working on what
new things will be in 1.6.1 and beyond.  To take a look ahead to see
what features have been added for releases that have not yet been made,
take a look at the trunk version of the CHANGES file:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/trunk/CHANGES?view=markup

Even though new features will be added in point releases of Asterisk
1.6, that does not mean that any deprecated functionality will be
removed as has been done between major releases in the past.  In fact,
we have decided that maintaining backwards compatibility is of the
utmost importance for configuration and external interfaces.  C API and
ABI compatibility is not guaranteed between point releases.  However,
things like dialplan applications, functions, and AGI commands will not
disappear just because there is a new and better way to accomplish the
same thing.

With Asterisk 1.4, once Asterisk 1.4.N is released, Asterisk 1.4.X is no
longer supported, where X < N.  With Asterisk 1.6, the development team
plans to maintain a total of 3 releases at a time.  For example, the
development team will support Asterisk 1.6.0, 1.6.1, and 1.6.2 until
1.6.3 is released.  This means that for the time that 1.6.0 is
supported, there may be 1.6.0.1, 1.6.0.2, etc. releases that include
fixes for regressions found in 1.6.0.

With Asterisk 1.4, the goal has been to make releases every 4 to 6
weeks.  With Asterisk 1.6, we aim to release updates in a similar time
frame, but it is likely that it will be closer to 6 to 8 weeks for
Asterisk 1.6 due to a more strict beta and release candidate testing
cycle for each point release.

The number of releases supported and release time frames are not yet set
in stone.  The development team is interested in adjusting these
policies to help meet the desires of the Asterisk community.

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--- Download ----------------------------------------------------
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Asterisk 1.6.0 is available for immediate download from the Digium
downloads site:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-1.6.0.tar.gz

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--- Reporting Issues --------------------------------------------
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The bug tracking process is one of the best places to get started in the
Asterisk development community.  Please report all issues to
http://bugs.digium.com/.  Live discussion about current issues is done
on the Freenode IRC network, in the #asterisk-bugs or #asterisk-dev
channels.

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Thank you very much for your continued support of the Asterisk project!