[asterisk-dev] [OT] - Question about dev activity

[Andrew Latham]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 10:53 PM, Pablo Perez
<pablo-asterisk at mirlingua.net> wrote:
> Hello everyone and sorry for my extremely off-topic irruption into your
> mailing list :)
>
> I am doing a bit of research about the Asterisk Community for a FOSS course.
>
> Can anyone tell me / point to the answer to this 2 questions?
>
> 1. How many people has contributed to code in the last six months?
>
> 2. How large is the community?
>
> And then, if you have 2 spare more seconds, maybe it would be really
> interesting if you could tell me your impressions about this other two
> points:
>
> 3. Licensing. To which extent does it affect to you the licensing policy of
> asterisik? You reckon it stops many many other hackers to contribute?
>
> 4. What about subversion? Won't you be better off with a distributed version
> control system.
>
> Again, I am extremely sorry for harassing you with these questions. Really.
> But you can always delete it after a quick scan, and maybe someone would
> like to share their thoughts with me...
>
> Cheers, and keep up the good work,
> Pablo


Pablo

For your questions this may be the correct list.  I will take a stab.

1.  Short Answer: Many!  Long Answer: On the
https://issues.asterisk.org site there is a drop down of users.
During commits the SVN messages should contain a link to the issue and
any testers and code submissions.  This is not always accurate.
Sometimes a developer finds a bug and fixes it without noticing an
issue ticket like two people inventing something at the same time.
There is http://svnview.digium.com/svn which has detailed info on all
developer commits.  Keep in mind that developers, testers, reports all
play an important part of the process.

2.  The mailing list has a hard time keeping up at times.  I think the
mailing list folks could do a count of email addresses.  There are
forums and IRC.  Many sub projects.  Again the user list on the issue
tracker may be a good indication of the total active community
members.  Lurkers who are actively working on Asterisk are hard to
track.

3. There are two types of people, those that understand the licenses
and how they work, and everyone else.  The licensing of Asterisk and
related projects is great in my opinion.  Lots of transparency.  The
disclaimer is very easy to work with IMHO.  You may get a better and
more accurate answer from a lawyer.

4. There are actually many people developing Asterisk and related
projects with different tools.  Asterisk SCF uses GIT for example.
Asterisk used CVS in the past.  SVN is integrated with the mailing
lists and with the issue tracker at the moment.

I think you asked some simple and polite questions about the
development side of Asterisk.

~~~ Andrew "lathama" Latham lathama at gmail.com ~~~