[asterisk-users] Discussion: Are we ready to leave 1.4 behind?

[Olle E. Johansson]

Friends,

We have a discussion on asterisk-dev about the maintenance of the 1.4 branch. According to the release plans, support for 1.4 was scheduled to close in April 2011 - basically now. After that, only security patches would be committed. This is already a delay from the original plan published by Russell Bryant.

Unfortunately, I think this is way too early. My feeling and experience is that 1.8 is not ready for production in the environments I work in - large scale installations. Customers are not planning migration and all new installs are still 1.4. Tests we've been doing with 1.8 has failed within just a short time and so badly that customers has not paid me to spend any further time with 1.8.

Last time we went through this process with a LTS release (which we did not know then) it took over one year before we had a stable product to migrate away from 1.2 and jump on the 1.4 track. Hopefully, with the help of community, we can move up to 1.8 late this year or early next year. For me 1.8 is the focus, it's the LTS release.

Not having a supported 1.4 version from the Digium-hosted repositories will mean that we will have to move to separate repositories or branch off from the main track. I already maintain a ton of subversion branches with various patches to 1.4 It takes a lot of time to manage this version that is a fork from the main 1.4 branch. I will soon have to start working with subversion branches for 1.8 to create a compatible version for my customers to test, since most of the patches is not part of 1.8. After a few years of doing this, I know the work involved with managing code myself.

The Digium team wants to go ahead and not support 1.4 any more, I want to keep 1.4 open for normal bug fixes. What do you think?

Kevin proposed that the community maintains the 1.4 branch without support from the Digium team. I don't think that's a good solution, but it may be the only solution.  I haven't got the resources to manage the 1.4 code myself, so I won't step forward as a maintainer if I can't get proper funding. Anyone else out there that has the time and resources to manage the code?

Feel free to send me mail off list if you have ideas or suggestions on how to solve this - or continue the discussion here.

Regards,
/Olle

PS. Please don't start a discussion about 1.8 quality in this thread, that's a separate issue. I just want to know what you think about closing 1.4 support now. If you want to discuss 1.8 quality, start a new thread. Thanks.