asterisk users - Apr 2011 - Discussion: Are we ready to leave 1.4 behind?

Friends,

We have a discussion on asterisk-dev about the maintenance of the 1.4 branch.
According to the release plans, support for 1.4 was scheduled to close in April
2011 - basically now. After that, only security patches would be committed. This
is already a delay from the original plan published by Russell Bryant.

Unfortunately, I think this is way too early. My feeling and experience is that
1.8 is not ready for production in the environments I work in - large scale
installations. Customers are not planning migration and all new installs are
still 1.4. Tests we've been doing with 1.8 has failed within just a short
time and so badly that customers has not paid me to spend any further time with
1.8.

Last time we went through this process with a LTS release (which we did not know
then) it took over one year before we had a stable product to migrate away from
1.2 and jump on the 1.4 track. Hopefully, with the help of community, we can
move up to 1.8 late this year or early next year. For me 1.8 is the focus,
it's the LTS release.

Not having a supported 1.4 version from the Digium-hosted repositories will mean
that we will have to move to separate repositories or branch off from the main
track. I already maintain a ton of subversion branches with various patches to
1.4 It takes a lot of time to manage this version that is a fork from the main
1.4 branch. I will soon have to start working with subversion branches for 1.8
to create a compatible version for my customers to test, since most of the
patches is not part of 1.8. After a few years of doing this, I know the work
involved with managing code myself.

The Digium team wants to go ahead and not support 1.4 any more, I want to keep
1.4 open for normal bug fixes. What do you think?

Kevin proposed that the community maintains the 1.4 branch without support from
the Digium team. I don't think that's a good solution, but it may be the
only solution.  I haven't got the resources to manage the 1.4 code myself,
so I won't step forward as a maintainer if I can't get proper funding.
Anyone else out there that has the time and resources to manage the code?

Feel free to send me mail off list if you have ideas or suggestions on how to
solve this - or continue the discussion here.

Regards,
/Olle

PS. Please don't start a discussion about 1.8 quality in this thread,
that's a separate issue. I just want to know what you think about closing
1.4 support now. If you want to discuss 1.8 quality, start a new thread. Thanks.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-users-
> bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Olle E. Johansson
> Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 2:34 PM
> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
> Subject: [asterisk-users] Discussion: Are we ready to leave 1.4 behind?
> 
> Friends,
> 
> We have a discussion on asterisk-dev about the maintenance of the 1.4
> branch. According to the release plans, support for 1.4 was scheduled to
> close in April 2011 - basically now. After that, only security patches
> would be committed. This is already a delay from the original plan
> published by Russell Bryant.
> 
> Unfortunately, I think this is way too early. My feeling and experience is
> that 1.8 is not ready for production in the environments I work in - large
> scale installations. Customers are not planning migration and all new
> installs are still 1.4. Tests we've been doing with 1.8 has failed
within
> just a short time and so badly that customers has not paid me to spend any
> further time with 1.8.
> 
<snip>
> 
> Not having a supported 1.4 version from the Digium-hosted repositories
> will mean that we will have to move to separate repositories or branch off
> from the main track. I already maintain a ton of subversion branches with
> various patches to 1.4 It takes a lot of time to manage this version that
> is a fork from the main 1.4 branch. I will soon have to start working with
> subversion branches for 1.8 to create a compatible version for my
> customers to test, since most of the patches is not part of 1.8. After a
> few years of doing this, I know the work involved with managing code
> myself.
> 
> The Digium team wants to go ahead and not support 1.4 any more, I want to
> keep 1.4 open for normal bug fixes. What do you think?
> 
> Kevin proposed that the community maintains the 1.4 branch without support
> from the Digium team. I don't think that's a good solution, but it
may be
> the only solution.  I haven't got the resources to manage the 1.4 code
> myself, so I won't step forward as a maintainer if I can't get
proper
> funding. Anyone else out there that has the time and resources to manage
> the code?
> 
> Feel free to send me mail off list if you have ideas or suggestions on how
> to solve this - or continue the discussion here.
> 
> Regards,
> /Olle
[Danny Nicholas] 
IMO, 1.4 should be kept open for bug fixes since it is the "current working
standard" - until 1.8 works in parallel function-for-function with 1.4, it
is NOT a production-ready release.  What good is a Ferrari with 3 tires?

----- Original Message -----
> Friends,
> 
> SNIP
> 
> Unfortunately, I think this is way too early. My feeling and
> experience is that 1.8 is not ready for production in the environments
> I work in - large scale installations. Customers are not planning
> migration and all new installs are still 1.4. Tests we've been doing
> with 1.8 has failed within just a short time and so badly that
> customers has not paid me to spend any further time with 1.8.
> 
> SNIP
>
I've found the same issues. Asterisk 1.4.x is extremely stable and is
running on all of our direct infrastructure as well as our customer owned
infrastructure. Testing of the 1.8.x branch has shown quite a few problems and
I'm definitely not putting it into production any time soon. It *IS* a good
step forward, and I'm excited to see where it ends up, but I certainly
don't find it to be a valid replacement for rock solid 1.4.x boxes right
now.

I hope enough others echo simlar findings to allow a second look at a Digium
maintained 1.4.x.

Unfortunately, we (personally, or company wise) cannot offer any development
resources for a community maintained 1.4.x branch.

--Tim

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 3:34 PM, Olle E. Johansson <oej at edvina.net>
wrote:
> Friends,
>
> We have a discussion on asterisk-dev about the maintenance of the 1.4
branch. According to the release plans, support for 1.4 was scheduled to close
in April 2011 - basically now. After that, only security patches would be
committed. This is already a delay from the original plan published by Russell
Bryant.
>
> Unfortunately, I think this is way too early. My feeling and experience is
that 1.8 is not ready for production in the environments I work in - large scale
installations. Customers are not planning migration and all new installs are
still 1.4. Tests we've been doing with 1.8 has failed within just a short
time and so badly that customers has not paid me to spend any further time with
1.8.
>
> Last time we went through this process with a LTS release (which we did not
know then) it took over one year before we had a stable product to migrate away
from 1.2 and jump on the 1.4 track. Hopefully, with the help of community, we
can move up to 1.8 late this year or early next year. For me 1.8 is the focus,
it's the LTS release.
>
> Not having a supported 1.4 version from the Digium-hosted repositories will
mean that we will have to move to separate repositories or branch off from the
main track. I already maintain a ton of subversion branches with various patches
to 1.4 It takes a lot of time to manage this version that is a fork from the
main 1.4 branch. I will soon have to start working with subversion branches for
1.8 to create a compatible version for my customers to test, since most of the
patches is not part of 1.8. After a few years of doing this, I know the work
involved with managing code myself.
>
> The Digium team wants to go ahead and not support 1.4 any more, I want to
keep 1.4 open for normal bug fixes. What do you think?
>
> Kevin proposed that the community maintains the 1.4 branch without support
from the Digium team. I don't think that's a good solution, but it may
be the only solution. ?I haven't got the resources to manage the 1.4 code
myself, so I won't step forward as a maintainer if I can't get proper
funding. Anyone else out there that has the time and resources to manage the
code?
>
> Feel free to send me mail off list if you have ideas or suggestions on how
to solve this - or continue the discussion here.
>
> Regards,
> /Olle
>
> PS. Please don't start a discussion about 1.8 quality in this thread,
that's a separate issue. I just want to know what you think about closing
1.4 support now. If you want to discuss 1.8 quality, start a new thread. Thanks.
Olle

I(me, my opinion, my feelings, my commercial view) am on the side of
dropping support for 1.4 and 1.6.  1.8 had some major issues which are
resolved/being worked on with more energy as older platforms are shut
down. If a large enough security issue showed up, I hope we would all
try to do the right thing and push it back to 1.6 and 1.4. Support
must end sometime. Merging changes across many versions is very
difficult and time consuming.  Asterisk GUI is very limited do to its
1.4 support code.  There are users that still use 1.2 and are very
happy.  They are not looking for new features. I hope the 1.4 / 1.6
users can survive while they test the 1.8 branch and share why or why
not it will fit their needs.

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

Le 27/04/2011 21:34, Olle E. Johansson a ?crit :
> Friends,
>
> We have a discussion on asterisk-dev about the maintenance of the 1.4
branch. According to the release plans, support for 1.4 was scheduled to close
in April 2011 - basically now. After that, only security patches would be
committed. This is already a delay from the original plan published by Russell
Bryant.
>
> Unfortunately, I think this is way too early. My feeling and experience is
that 1.8 is not ready for production in the environments I work in - large scale
installations. Customers are not planning migration and all new installs are
still 1.4. Tests we've been doing with 1.8 has failed within just a short
time and so badly that customers has not paid me to spend any further time with
1.8.
[...]

Agree with you at 100%. 1.8 is not ready for production. I remember our 
switch from 1.2 to 1.4  very early and had huge problems (misdn and 
B410P just comes in my mind), had to work with trunk, aso. At 1.4.8 or 
so it started to be stable. We're now at 1.8.3 ...

Also, latest 1.4 had some regressions (eg voicemailbox sequences), which 
means that we're not, at this time, sure that basic stuffs are working 
smoothly with 1.4.41 What happends if new regressions appears?

My vote goes to stay with 1.4 and continue to stabilize it (not asking 
to include new stuff) till community declare that 1.8 is at the level of 
1.4.

-- 
Daniel

On Wed, 27 Apr 2011, Olle E. Johansson wrote:
> The Digium team wants to go ahead and not support 1.4 any more, I want 
> to keep 1.4 open for normal bug fixes. What do you think?
I would like to see continued bug and security fixes for 1.4 for some time 
yet.

As well as a raft of hosted servers, I have several hundred systems out 
there - many small embedded type installations (boot from flash, run in 
ram - my own custom Linux install) - a lot still running 1.2 which will 
never be upgraded until they die.

I didn't find 1.4 stable enough for my needs until about the late 
1.4.20's.

And really, I don't have a need for 1.4 - 1.2 did (and still does) 
everything I need to build a PBX capable of a few 100 extensions, but I 
felt that if I didn't move then things would get tough - no bug fixes, no 
support, and being laughed at for being such a dinosaur...

Right now, I've no plans at all to move to 1.8, nor the time at present to 
even download, compile and test it. There are no features in it that I 
need and no bugs (that affect me & my simple needs) that it fixes in 1.4 
that I'm aware of. So I don't feel the point. (The one thing it might
have
- BRI support in DAHDI is now moot as I've decided to abandon all on-board 
PSTN hardware and use external devices as it's much less of a hassle 
all-round and I want to sell SIP minutes!)

Gordon

I agree 100%, it's too early.
There is a lot of businnes out of there based on 1.4 (even still 1.2), 
and my feelings is that a lot of people is not going to upgrade the 
asterisk version, they are going to stay with 1.4 for a long time yet.

Also i wanna add another little consideration. Voip is not only a 
software matter, is a Telecomunication matter. And into the 
Telecomunication world the first priority is the reliability and 
reliability and reliability without forget that usually the lifetime of 
a telecomunicaton product is much more than 4 years.

I'm not a code writer so I can't put my effort in maintaince stuff.

I think 1.4 should be open at least for some critical bug like for 
example segmentation fault or memory leack.
Matteo


Il 27/04/2011 21:34, Olle E. Johansson ha scritto:
> Friends,
>
> We have a discussion on asterisk-dev about the maintenance of the 1.4
branch. According to the release plans, support for 1.4 was scheduled to close
in April 2011 - basically now. After that, only security patches would be
committed. This is already a delay from the original plan published by Russell
Bryant.
>
> Unfortunately, I think this is way too early. My feeling and experience is
that 1.8 is not ready for production in the environments I work in - large scale
installations. Customers are not planning migration and all new installs are
still 1.4. Tests we've been doing with 1.8 has failed within just a short
time and so badly that customers has not paid me to spend any further time with
1.8.
>
> Last time we went through this process with a LTS release (which we did not
know then) it took over one year before we had a stable product to migrate away
from 1.2 and jump on the 1.4 track. Hopefully, with the help of community, we
can move up to 1.8 late this year or early next year. For me 1.8 is the focus,
it's the LTS release.
>
> Not having a supported 1.4 version from the Digium-hosted repositories will
mean that we will have to move to separate repositories or branch off from the
main track. I already maintain a ton of subversion branches with various patches
to 1.4 It takes a lot of time to manage this version that is a fork from the
main 1.4 branch. I will soon have to start working with subversion branches for
1.8 to create a compatible version for my customers to test, since most of the
patches is not part of 1.8. After a few years of doing this, I know the work
involved with managing code myself.
>
> The Digium team wants to go ahead and not support 1.4 any more, I want to
keep 1.4 open for normal bug fixes. What do you think?
>
> Kevin proposed that the community maintains the 1.4 branch without support
from the Digium team. I don't think that's a good solution, but it may
be the only solution.  I haven't got the resources to manage the 1.4 code
myself, so I won't step forward as a maintainer if I can't get proper
funding. Anyone else out there that has the time and resources to manage the
code?
>
> Feel free to send me mail off list if you have ideas or suggestions on how
to solve this - or continue the discussion here.
>
> Regards,
> /Olle
>
> PS. Please don't start a discussion about 1.8 quality in this thread,
that's a separate issue. I just want to know what you think about closing
1.4 support now. If you want to discuss 1.8 quality, start a new thread. Thanks.
> --
> _____________________________________________________________________
> -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com --
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----- Original Message -----
> From: "Olle E. Johansson" <oej at edvina.net>
> To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion"
<asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 3:34:03 PM
> Subject: [asterisk-users] Discussion: Are we ready to leave 1.4 behind?
>
> Friends,
>
> We have a discussion on asterisk-dev about the maintenance of the 1.4
> branch. According to the release plans, support for 1.4 was
> scheduled to close in April 2011 - basically now. After that, only
> security patches would be committed. This is already a delay from
> the original plan published by Russell Bryant.
>
> Unfortunately, I think this is way too early. My feeling and
> experience is that 1.8 is not ready for production in the
> environments I work in - large scale installations. Customers are
> not planning migration and all new installs are still 1.4. Tests
> we've been doing with 1.8 has failed within just a short time and so
> badly that customers has not paid me to spend any further time with
> 1.8.
>
Whats the game plan to get 1.8 "ready for production"?  To me, for
which I say this with all respect, some are focusing still on 1.4 instead of
getting 1.8 to the level that some of the members of the community are wanting
to see.  1.4 has been very stable for a while.  To the point that I only pay
attention to security releases to be honest.  It has been this way for quite a
while now.  I personally have been focused more on using 1.8 when I can, mainly
on non-critical servers, yet I will admit that I have enough confidence in it
now to use on main servers.  Why?  Because I want to get my production servers
off of 1.4 and 1.6.2 due to new features.  But, even if I didn't need or
want the new features, the current state of 1.4 is excellent.  If I don't
ever make the move beyond 1.4, how can I contribute to a better product?  By
experimenting and not giving up at the first sign of trouble with the latest
version, I feel that I can help to make 1.8 better which ultimately benefits me
and the community.  I would like to hear a game plan before we just say, yes,
lets keep focusing on 1.4 and then we will decide a deadline to stop support.  I
am afraid that software is programmed by imperfect humans and there will always
be a bug or two that crops up from time to time.  Do we want to keep waiting
until we feel it is "perfect"?

One thing I have noticed, is that the bug fixes and patches being contributed
for 1.8 and trunk are not being taken care of as quickly as it used to back in
the early 1.4 days.  My feelings are that it is because there have been too many
releases to work on.  Going back to focusing on just 1.8 and trunk, would go a
long way to speeding up bug fixes to 1.8.  Again, just my opinion.
> Last time we went through this process with a LTS release (which we
> did not know then) it took over one year before we had a stable
> product to migrate away from 1.2 and jump on the 1.4 track.
> Hopefully, with the help of community, we can move up to 1.8 late
> this year or early next year. For me 1.8 is the focus, it's the LTS
> release.
>
> Not having a supported 1.4 version from the Digium-hosted
> repositories will mean that we will have to move to separate
> repositories or branch off from the main track. I already maintain a
> ton of subversion branches with various patches to 1.4 It takes a
> lot of time to manage this version that is a fork from the main 1.4
> branch. I will soon have to start working with subversion branches
> for 1.8 to create a compatible version for my customers to test,
> since most of the patches is not part of 1.8. After a few years of
> doing this, I know the work involved with managing code myself.
>
> The Digium team wants to go ahead and not support 1.4 any more, I
> want to keep 1.4 open for normal bug fixes. What do you think?
Was this really Digium's decision?  You keep mentioning Digium and implying
them as the evil one in all of this (perhaps I am just misunderstanding your
tone in your emails and if I am, I sincerely apologize for this) when I seem to
recall plenty of discussion around these time lines and it was the community who
set the deadlines, not Digium.  Digium is just trying to abide by the time lines
outlined for them by the community.  They have already been nice enough to
extend the deadline in order to finish working on outstanding bug reports and
patches.  They have bills to pay too and have really tried to extend an olive
branch to everyone in the community.  There has been a lot of activity on the
1.4 branch lately.  If I am wrong, I will gladly retract my comments.
>
> Kevin proposed that the community maintains the 1.4 branch without
> support from the Digium team. I don't think that's a good solution,
> but it may be the only solution.  I haven't got the resources to
> manage the 1.4 code myself, so I won't step forward as a maintainer
> if I can't get proper funding. Anyone else out there that has the
> time and resources to manage the code?
Again, I don't feel Digium really should be brought up in this discussion. 
It seems that the main motivation for bringing this up is to get people to speak
up as if a commercial entity is trying to hurt the community somehow by no
longer being able to offer their resources on an older code base.

There are many people and projects who financially are depending on 1.4.  If
this was so important to them, why was it not brought up sooner?  Why don't
these ones then help with the maintenance of bugs?  So far I keep hearing,
"Yes, lets keep supporting 1.4.  Oh but I can't help out with
maintaining it".  All companies involved with or who use Asterisk are
benefiting from the community.  Why are they not helping to get 1.8 stable, or
"production ready"?  Instead, they don't seem to balance between
benefiting from the community and contributing back so that the latest version
with the new features that others may need, gets to a production worthy state. 
The asterisk project needs to move on in order to stay where it is as one of the
leaders in the industry.  I am looking forward to 1.10 and would love to see the
community not being distracted with older releases.  This in the end will
benefit the whole community.

So, where is the game plan to make 1.8 the community's priority since it is
LTS?  That should be established first.  Then, how do we go about continuing to
support major bug fixes found in 1.4 as a community with the left over resources
(again the community's resources since we are the ones who established the
deadlines to begin with and it falls on us, not Digium, if we want to change it
now).  That should be the order of priorities in my mind.

I hope my comments are taken the right way.  My goal is to offer another
viewpoint and contribute to a positive discussion.

Michael
(elguero)

> We have a discussion on asterisk-dev about the maintenance of the 1.4
branch. According to the release plans, support for 1.4 was scheduled to close
in April 2011 - basically now. After that, only security patches would be
committed. This is already a delay from the original plan published by Russell
Bryant.
> Unfortunately, I think this is way too early.
I don't have first-hand experience or an opinion on this matter, but just
wanted to comment on how refreshingly welcome it is to have this discussion at
all - without Open Source, we'd simply be stuck with a "Vista"
type software (if I believe those who expressed concerns about 1.8).

I do have one question: what about the ecosystem? Many people don't use
Asterisk by itself, but as part of distributions (PBX in a Flash, Trixbox, ...)
and with tools such as FreePBX to configure it. How ready is the ecosystem for
moving to a new Asterisk version?

I will throw in my 2 cents on this. I agree that 1.8 is not as stable as it 
needs to be. From my perspective I will continue to use the 1.4.x or 
1.6.2.x release that is the best fit for me and it should continue to do 
what it does and it get's it's security releases.

If the primary development focus is moved to 1.8 to get the lead out and 
stabilize it than that is what I want. New work on 1.10 should only be 
under taken after 1.8.x is stable then we can tinker with the newer stuff. 
Making it stable makes it stronger. As far as I can see 1.4.x is stable and 
that is what people want use it until 1.8.x is where you want it but test 
1.8.x help find the bugs so you can make the move otherwise stay with the 
solid 1.4.x and wait for others to find the bugs in the newer versions. I 
know of several companies that are on 1.2 and will make the move to a new 
version only if 1.2 fails them and it has not for their needs. Again we do 
need 1.8 to be stabilized quickly the stuck voicemail issues and system 
crashes are driving me crazy. 

Thanks to all of the developers who work on asterisk. The core makes my 
business possible. Keep up the good work

Thanks
Bryant

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----- Original Message -----
> PS. Please don't start a discussion about 1.8 quality in this thread,
> that's a separate issue. I just want to know what you think about
> closing 1.4 support now. If you want to discuss 1.8 quality, start a
> new thread. Thanks.
I don't think it's a separate issue at all.  I would like to see
discussion of exactly which issues are preventing users from using Asterisk 1.8.
We're trying to shift focus to those issues and get them resolved as quickly
and as efficiently as we can so that we can all move forward.

Resources are limited.  What is the best use of our time to help ensure the best
future?  Where do we want to see the project in the next 6 months to a year?  A
primary focus on further solidifying Asterisk 1.8 is what gets us there in my
mind.

Asterisk 1.4 was released 4.5 years ago.  It mostly "just works", and
I fully expect many to keep using it until they see a need to migrate.  This
process has been likened to when the community moved from Asterisk 1.2 to 1.4. 
Asterisk 1.8 has been much more stable out of the gate than 1.4, due to many
things we have done over the years to increase quality, including:

1) We have adopted peer code reviews as common practice for all non-trivial
changes going into Asterisk.  This alone has _greatly_ increased the quality of
the code going in.  It is rare that a patch goes up for review where someone
doesn't point out some sort of problem.  These problems are found and fixed
_much_ faster in the up front review process than if it had been many months
later when someone encountered it as a bug in the field.

2) We have placed an increased emphasis on automated testing efforts.  In
addition to building up a lot of test environments inside of Digium, there is
now an open source automated testing effort for Asterisk.  There are over 200
test cases that run every time anyone touches the code.  This includes complex
call scenarios such as transfers and call parking.  These open source test cases
touch about 25% of the code (and what it does touch are things we considered
some of the most important parts).  That is a huge step forward from where we
started.  We are continuing to place more and more resources on this effort to
move it forward.

Despite comments in this thread, there _are_ many people using Asterisk 1.8 in
production, including large installations.  The ones with systems working
perfectly fine don't tend to make as much noise.  :-)  For those still
getting hit by problems, I hope that you can make the time to report them so
that we can work with you to get them resolved.

I started my work on Asterisk as a volunteer 7 years ago and even though it is
now my full time job, I still put many personal hours into the project.  I care
very deeply about the success of Asterisk.  I truly believe that the steps we
have taken with release management are in the best interest of the project.

Thanks,

-- 
Russell Bryant
Digium, Inc.   |   Engineering Manager, Open Source Software
445 Jan Davis Drive NW    -     Huntsville, AL 35806  -  USA
www.digium.com  -=-  www.asterisk.org -=- blogs.asterisk.org

On Wed, 2011-04-27 at 21:34 +0200, Olle E. Johansson
wrote:
> Friends,
> 
> We have a discussion on asterisk-dev about the maintenance of the 1.4
branch.
> According to the release plans, support for 1.4 was scheduled to close in
April 2011 - basically now.
> After that, only security patches would be committed. This is already a
delay from the original plan published by Russell Bryant.
> 
> Unfortunately, I think this is way too early. 
> My feeling and experience is that 1.8 is not ready for production in the
environments I work in - large scale installations.
> Customers are not planning migration and all new installs are still 1.4.
> Tests we've been doing with 1.8 has failed within just a short time and
so badly that customers has not paid me to spend any further time with 1.8.
> 
Just a thought
If "Digium" / "the community" realy want an objective way of
deciding
whether can/should migrate to any other version, you realy need a
feature-matrix (pethaps starting from version 1.2.*)

And for every and each version a statement if it is:
- discontinued
- tested
- test finalized, result indicating it is fully and identically
functional
- test finalized, result indicating that this feature is changed in
either behaviour of configuration
- not yet tested.

I realize it is quite a job to do, but if done it would be for everyone
easily to see if it is worthwhile to start migrating.

Anyway for both documentation purposes and bugtracking it would be nice
if each and "every feature" has a unique numerique identifier.

And perhaps there is a fair chance that the people from the quality
department at Digium already have such a list.....


hw

On 3/05/11 4:01 AM, Hans Witvliet wrote:
> Just a thought
> If "Digium" / "the community" realy want an objective
way of deciding
> whether can/should migrate to any other version, you realy need a
> feature-matrix (pethaps starting from version 1.2.*)
>
> And for every and each version a statement if it is:
> - discontinued
> - tested
> - test finalized, result indicating it is fully and identically
> functional
> - test finalized, result indicating that this feature is changed in
> either behaviour of configuration
> - not yet tested.
+1 From me - this would be fantastic!

-- 
Cheers,

Matt Riddell
_______________________________________________

http://www.venturevoip.com/news.php (Daily Asterisk News)
http://www.venturevoip.com/exchange.php (Full ITSP Solution)
http://www.venturevoip.com/cc.php (Call Centre Solutions)

_____  

From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Olivier
Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2011 11:33 PM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Discussion: Are we ready to leave 1.4 behind?

 

 

2011/5/5 Flavio Goncalves <flavio at asteriskguide.com>
<snip>

but stuffing Asterisk with
many  new features on each version does not seem to be contributing to
the stability of the code or the migration to newer versions.


yes but it seems to me that code stability is improving.
Maybe next 1.10.0 version will be "production-ready" from day 1 ?
 


Flavio E. Goncalves
www.asteriskguide.com



 

Compare to which version of Windows. Patches are a never ending process

 

Cary Fitch

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----------------------------------------
 From: "Ira" <ira at extrasensory.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2011 12:38 PM
To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion" 
<asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Discussion: Are we ready to leave 1.4 
behind?

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 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------

Ira

Contact me off list and we can have a conversation. We are running 1.6.2.x 
boxes and 1.8.x boxes very successfully. We have had issues with 1.8.x but 
that is to be expected as it has been bleeding edge at times.  I am not a 
linux expert either but if I may be ableo to point you in the right 
direction. Your determination to support Asterisk is what the community 
needs if I can help foster that I would be happy to do so.  I am only where 
I am at because others invested some time in me.  

examples: The power of IRC chats. I spend three days on the freenas forums 
and could not solve a problem I was just pulling my hair out. I took 20 min 
to get up to speed with irc using IceChat and after 1.5 hours on the 
freenas board the problem was solved and I was diving deep into the guts of 
the freenas 8 system. it was a game changer for me.

Bryant
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I am still using Asterisk 1.4 because of the Asterisk GUI. I don't
understand why it was ever dropped, it's easy to setup (no SQL
databases), quick, works well and in my experiance it gets along with
manual config file changes.

The only real issue I've encountered with 1.4 is Digium can't seem to
properly build RPMs...


Med Vennlig Hilsen,

A. Helge Joakimsen