[asterisk-biz] Asterisk Release Maintenance News

[The Asterisk Development Team]

Greetings Asterisk Enthusiasts,

Last week, about 50 developers gathered in Atlanta, GA, USA at the
Georgia Tech University's Information Security Center (GTISC) for a week
of discussion about the future of Asterisk.  One of the topics that came
up was the future of the existing Asterisk release branches.

Asterisk 1.2 was released in the Fall of 2005.  At this time, Asterisk
1.0 was put into security maintenance, meaning that it only received
changes to fix security issues, and not changes intended to fix less
severe issues.

Asterisk 1.4 was released in the Fall of 2006.  At this time, Asterisk
1.0 became officially unsupported.  However, we continued to fully
maintain Asterisk 1.2.  Now that Asterisk 1.4 has been out for about 5
months, we are taking steps toward moving Asterisk 1.2 to security
maintenance only.  We plan on aiming for this to happen on August 1st, 2007.

What does this mean for you?

It means that if you are using Asterisk 1.2, you should start
considering a plan for upgrading your servers to Asterisk 1.4.  Asterisk
1.2 is not going away anytime soon.  You can expect that Asterisk 1.2
will be maintained for security issues until Asterisk 1.6 is released,
and most likely longer than that.  However, some time after Asterisk 1.6
is available, Asterisk 1.2 will become officially deprecated and no
longer supported with fixes of any kind from the core Asterisk
development community.

We ask that you please work with us to help ensure that Asterisk 1.4 is
a stable platform for your telephony needs.  If you find a bug, please
work with the development community to help get it resolved.  After all,
this is a community project!  Remember, before creating a bug report on
http://bugs.digium.com/, check to make sure there isn't already a report
for the same problem.

The development team is very dedicated to fixing bugs and maintaining
feature frozen releases.  Our maintenance of the Asterisk 1.2 series for
over a year and a half is a testament to this.  We are going to work
very hard over the next couple of months to help ensure that Asterisk
1.4 is the best Asterisk release series yet.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we move forward with
Asterisk development, and as always, thank you very much for your support!

--
The Asterisk.org Development Team