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

[Paul Belanger]

On 11-05-04 06:01 PM, Matt Riddell wrote:
> On 3/05/11 4:01 AM, Hans Witvliet wrote:
>> Just a thought
>> If "Digium" / "the community" realy want an objective way of deciding
>> whether can/should migrate to any other version, you realy need a
>> feature-matrix (pethaps starting from version 1.2.*)
>>
>> And for every and each version a statement if it is:
>> - discontinued
>> - tested
>> - test finalized, result indicating it is fully and identically
>> functional
>> - test finalized, result indicating that this feature is changed in
>> either behaviour of configuration
>> - not yet tested.
>
> +1 From me - this would be fantastic!
>

Here is the thing, there is nothing stopping 'the community' today from 
doing this.  In fact, we already have a testsuite [1] in place, running 
each subversion commit and producing results for the last year.  But 
this is only one type of testing; automated, we also have unit tests 
built into Asterisk that run too (EG: a unit test to parse SIP URI). 
Again, each subversion commit we run the tests and validate results.

There is still lots of work that needs to be done though. More test 
plans and test cases to be added, more code to be written and libraries 
added, getting more people involved in testing Asterisk Release 
Candidates (RCs) or patches on the issue tracker.

That is the hardest part, getting people involved.  Sure it is easy to 
say Asterisk is not stable, not production ready or it crashes all the 
time; fair enough but we have tools in place to help resolve that. Just 
in this thread alone I don't believe one person has answered the call of 
Olle to volunteer time to help maintain Asterisk 1.4 (if I am incorrect 
please speak up, I must have missed your name). Additionally, this 
almost exact point was raise on the asterisk-dev mailing list in 2009 
[1] (a great read BTW, lots of great ideas) however due to the lack of 
interest it did not go to far.

So how can we fix this?  How can we get more people involded?  What 
makes projects like FedoraTesting[3] and DebianTesting[4] popular?  How 
can the Asterisk project reproduce their success?

As I've said before, I'm more then willing to help with answering 
questions about the testsuite or reviewing code that people want to get 
merged in.  We also have an IRC channel, #asterisk-testing available for 
people to join, ask question, idle, lurk, etc, or if you want to reply 
to this thread, feel free.  But get involved! :)

[1] http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-dev/2010-February/042387.html
[2] http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-dev/2009-March/037262.html
[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraTesting
[4] http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/

-- 
Paul Belanger
Digium, Inc. | Software Developer
twitter: pabelanger | IRC: pabelanger (Freenode)
Check us out at: http://digium.com & http://asterisk.org