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

[Ira]

At 07:56 AM 5/5/2011, you wrote:
>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?

Well, it's not a lot of people willing to run beta software on their 
phone system. Phones need to work and for most people they need to 
work perfectly all the time. I'm one of those oddities that will 
always run beta software if given the chance but my experience is 
that quite rare.

>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! :)

So I'm the person who has never been able to keep 1.8 alive on my 
system for more than a minute or two and I've probably tried more 
than 10 different betas and release versions. I posted a bug report 
which was closed in minutes, I posted the problem on this list every 
few tries and zero response. I tried to figure out mIRC. It's 
installed on my machine but I've never got past that. I just don't 
get the instructions.

I know that all the people involved in the project are Linux heads, 
but some of us, like me, have a Linux box only because of Asterisk 
and if you want my help, you need to make being involved accessible 
and stop assuming we all know what you know. I see the words, "jut 
post a bug report on Mantis" posted all the time and I'm sure it 
means as little to others as it means to me. Maybe there needs to be 
a web page somewhere, "Asterisk beta testing for dummies" so that you 
can point us to so you don't have to answer the stupid questions over and over.

I've beta tested enough and had enough beta testers to understand the 
kinds of things that make it possible to get bugs fixed, but it's 
usually a very small percentage of users that understand that.

Ira