[asterisk-users] Asterisk news :: Next release of Asterisk will be 1.8 Long Term Support

[Olle E. Johansson]

Dear Asterisk community,

Yesterday, Russell Bryant finally made up his mind and confirmed on the asterisk-dev mailing list that the next release of Asterisk will be 1.8, which will also be a Long Term Support (LTS) release. This also means that the 1.4 is now officially classed as a LTS release too.

I feel that this is a very good solution for the whole Asterisk community and that we all will benefit from it. I have personally not been happy with the 1.6.x release schedule, which has been very misunderstood and has confused a large group of users. Hopefully, we can now continue with a release schedule that the world understands and that makes sense for everyone. While I understand the need for releasing quicker than we've done in the past, the detail about the naming, the actual release numbers (1.6.0, 1.6.1 etc) was very hard to explain to people. With years of experience of doing Asterisk and VoIP training, I have a lot of respect of the need of being able to easily explain things, from configuration details to release schedule...

Now we, the Asterisk community, need to focus quickly on the new release and plan what's going in there. If you have code for new features lying around (as I have tons of in various branches of my svn repository), now is the proper time to step forward, contribute it to the bug tracker and get it evaluated, discussed and maybe finally included in Asterisk. Whatever goes into 1.8 at release time, will be what we will have for production use for  a long time.

We also ask you to dedicate time during next year to help the Asterisk project with testing. You don't have to be a developer to test - and we need tests of everything from documentation to configuration and technichal issues. We don't have all of the equipment you have, we don't have your dialplans, we don't have all the applications you integrate Asterisk with. If Asterisk is important to your organization, please make sure that you dedicate time during the first half of 2010 to do regular testing of the new release betas and release candidates. We do need your help to make Asterisk 1.8 a good release, worthy to replace the 1.4 as a new LTS release. 

If you're a member of a Linux or Asterisk group, please help in organizing Asterisk 1.8 test-partys. If you need help with ideas, please contact our community liason, John Todd. Meeting other Asterisk users, testing stuff together is one of the best ways to expand your knowledge of Asterisk. Sharing ideas and how-to's in real time while setting up test labs and scenarious is really, really fun.

Here in Sweden, where I live, we have half a meter of snow and very cold weather. The days are very short and I've tried to brighten up the darkness by decorating my house with a large amount of blinking lamps. No, they're not SIP compliant using Subscribe/notify, sorry. That may be a project for a test - to see how many phones with subscriptions one Asterisk can carry. If that works out well, maybe my house's blinking lamps can be powered by SIP and Asterisk 1.8 next year :-)

This is the final workday for me before Christmas. Tomorrow, I'll bake the traditional Swedish Christmas ham in the owen and then continue with the Christmas bread. I just love Christmas - the food, the family and friends, the gifts and, well, the food again :-)

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

/Olle