[asterisk-users] Proposed changes to Asterisk release and support cycles

[Hans Witvliet]

On Tue, 2012-01-31 at 15:52 -0500, John Knight wrote:
> > I like the idea of LTR release more often that would have the
> > feature patches baked in.  Case in point the new conference app
> > requires a jump to version 10 while the 1.8 conference app is quite
> > useless but 1.8 is my LTR version so I am stuck without the
> > conference app in my mainline systems for two years. 
> 
> Well said!  This is also true of any type of long term supported
> release whether if it's an operating system, application, etc.  In the
> "LTS" name, it conjurs up thoughts of Ubuntu, but comparisons to
> RHEL/Fedora are far more appropriate I would think as Ubuntu focuses
> nearly exclusively on new point releases while backporting new
> features is what a company like Red Hat excels at and should be the
> prime example of how to run dual software channels (enterprise release
> in RHEL vs. hobby release in Fedora). 
> 
....

> 
> I know distros and applications are two fundamentally different
> things, with entirely different goals and requirements, but I still
> think Red Hat provides the best example because 1) they have turned it
> into a science how smooth their development process goes in ratio to
> satisfied customers and 2) it's the only other open source software
> project I can think of that can accurately compare.  In a past meeting
> I had with Digium while working for another company, they too directly
> drew a correlation between the new LTS idea and ubuntu lts/non-lts and
> rhel/fedora.
> 
> The conference app changes since 1.4 I haven't been thrilled with, but
> in the whole time I've been supporting 1.8.x for my customers, I've
> come up with a very stable solution building on it and I haven't had
> any surprises come my way.   
> 
very well said indeed.
Some (...) distro's think dat LTS implies a complete feature freeze.
Others are more flexibel about it, that besides current versions of
applications, they are willing to support both elder _and_ newer
versions. (as example, i'm refering to the fact that hours after the
anouncement, firefox10 became available for sles11)

As said, re-written features like conference, are that important that
one shouldn't have to wait years for the next LTS. So this overlap of
multiple LTS-versions looks very much attractive

Having said that, i do understand that multiple versions of
features/applications puts an huge extra burden on the people who have
to maintain both versions, as the original version (as the term LTS
implies) should be maintained with all its limitations also.

hw