[asterisk-users] Summary: Upgrading to Asterisk 1.4

[Johansson Olle E]

Friends,

Thanks for all the feedback. If you have additional success stories or  
important
issues, feel free to continue the discussion.

I've learned a lot from your input. As a developer, I spend too much  
time in
the bug tracker, working with particular bugs, so I often wonder how  
on earth
anyone can use this buggy platform for anything business-like. It  
really feels
good to get reports on people successfully using our software and meet
Asterisk users who just love the product and handle tons of calls  
every hour
with it.

And as a developer, everything is of course more simple and you live in
the future, moving forward to new features, new functions all the time  
based
on customer requirements or feature requests in the mailing list or the
bug tracker...

Now over to a summary of the feedback. I'm not going deeper into
bugs reported, those will be handled separately.

* DON'T TOUCH MY ASTERISK PBX

This discussion about the 1.4 upgrade situation has given very important
feedback. First, for a lot of users there's simply no reason to  
upgrade a
PBX everytime we release a new Asterisk.

Existing installations that work should not be touched unless there's a
very good reason to, like a new feature that makes business sense.
Just upgrading for the cause of upgrading is a feature of the non-open
software industry that gets a lot of revenue from upgrades.

We developers has to accept that people appreciate our work, but
decide not to upgrade every installation at every release.

We might have to reconsider our support policy here, where we
developers abandoned 1.2 this summer. We might need another
team that runs 1.2 support in the bug tracker.

* MAKE UPGRADING EASIER

Another issue is to make the upgrade much smoother. We can't
anticipate that people upgrade from 1.0 to 1.2 to 1.4 and read
all the docs for every release. They can jump from 0.8 to
1.4. Or 1.0 to the future release of 1.6. We need to assist that
and haven't made a good effort in doing so.

But even for upgrades from 1.2 to 1.4, we need to be more
clear about changes that are required, especially for 1.2
installations that already was upgraded from 1.0 and still
use the 1.0 configuration syntax. They are going to have
a broken configuration in 1.4 and this is the first time that
happens in Asterisk.

We need to make clear that Asterisk admins need to go through the
log files in 1.2 and check all deprecation warnings. These needs
to be fixed before even testing 1.4.

* USE ASTERISK 1.4 FOR NEW INSTALLATIONS, PLEASE

My personal goal would be to get the community to start using
1.4 for all new installations. We need to produce information
to help this upgrade path. It's not about upgrading systems,
since we're talking about new installations. It's about upgrading
the Asterisk admins and installers - human beings.

The success stories reported to me personally and on the list
indicates that 1.4 is indeed ready for production and it's a great  
product.

With that, I'm now changing my focus from SIP invite states,
RTP sessions and video formats to Christmas ham purchasing,
baking Christmas bread (julvört) and decorating the Christmas
tree. Of course, you understand that there's an Asterisk asterisk
on top of all those trees, right? :-)

After Christmas, I'm running the new Asterisk SIP Masterclass together
with Daniel Mierla here in Stockholm. He's one of the core OpenSER
developers and it's going to be a great class. I'm sure we will locate
a set of new interesting bugs in svn trunk during that week. I'm really
looking forward to that training. (Hint: We still have a few open
seats... :-) )

Greetings from a dark and cold place in Sweden, without a decent
amount of snow...

Have a wonderful, merry and cheerful Christmas!

/Olle