[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk Versioning

[Leif Madsen]

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 20:54:51 +0200, Walid Azab <wazab at gawab.com> wrote:
> Just want to understand the difference between Asterisk Versions and please
> correct me if I am wrong, I understand they are: 
>   
> Stable 
> CVS 
> CVS Head 

As I've noticed several posts regarding Asterisk versioning recently,
I thought I'd reply with how I understand Asterisk versioning to work.

The current stable release of Asterisk is 1.0.5. At Astricon in
October, version 1.0.0 was released. The release of Asterisk 1.0.0 is
where Asterisk development essencially forked. Prior to that 1.0.0
release Asterisk had a single development branch with versioned
releases via tarballs far and few between. These include 0.5.0 and
0.9.x releases. In pre-1.0.0 times Asterisk was mostly only available
via CVS.

Stable releases reside in both tarball and CVS formats. Tarballs are
snapshots of the Stable CVS branch when a number of changes have been
made since the prior release and when the Stable branch maintainer
(Russell Bryant) feels a new release is warranted. These versioned
released can also be obtained from CVS like so:

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs at cvs.digium.com:/usr/cvsroot
cvs login    - the password is anoncvs
cvs co -rv1-0-5 asterisk

There are always bug fixes being ported from the HEAD branch back to
the Stable branch of Asterisk. If you checkout from CVS with the
-rv1-0 tag then you will obtain the latest changes to the CVS branch
post-versioned releases. This is only recommended if you are
subscribed to the asterisk-cvs list and are monitoring changes.

Stable is for production systems.

CVS HEAD is where Asterisk development takes place. All major changes
to code including feature implementations and bug fixes happen. CVS
HEAD is also known to be referred to as Asterisk 1.1 in keeping with
the traditional Linux versioning number system of odd numbers for
development and even numbers for stable releases. However note that
you will never see a 1.1 release as currently snapshot releases from
HEAD are not being performed. Perhaps this will happen in future
development cycles. You will checkout HEAD from CVS if you do not
include a version tag as follows:

cvs co asterisk

HEAD is for development / test systems.

At some point the HEAD branch will be frozen to the inclusion of new
features. When that happens, systems will be deployed in an attempt to
find and squash any remaining bugs in preparation for a new major
Stable release. When this happens it will be reffered to as Asterisk
v1.2.

I believe 1.0.x and 1.2.x will run concurrently for some time while
migration issues are resolved. This would work much like moving from
Linux kernel 2.2.x to 2.4.x.

Once Asterisk 1.2.0 is released HEAD would refer again to a new
development branch where features will once again be included. If
snapshot releases were issued from this branch they would more than
likely be referred to as 1.3.x.

The above is my interpretation of Asterisk versioning. Corrections and
comments openly welcomed.

Thanks,
Leif Madsen.
http://www.leifmadsen.com