Asterisk VoIP News

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Asterisk 1.2 Release Plans

This was posted by the lively Ken Fleming. Detail the process they go through when putting together another release for Asterisk.



As previously mentioned on the lists by Olle Johannson, we are actively trying to get Asterisk in shape for a 1.2 release within the next 60 days. To accomplish this, we need a few things to happen:

1) A feature freeze - This will occur at the end of this month, with no new feature submissions accepted after July 31st. Any _pending_ feature patches in Mantis that have passed architecture review and functionality
testing before August 1st can be accepted into 1.2, if they make it through the remainder of the review processes and are able to be merged before August 15th.

2) Progress on open bugs - There are a number of bugs open in Mantis that are waiting for the poster to provide additional information, test results, call traces, etc. We would much prefer to not release 1.2 with suspected problems already identified, but we cannot solve them without adequate input from you. If you have an open bug and are not in a position to continue providing assistance in solving it, please post a message to the mailing lists asking for volunteers to help replicate the problem so it can get resolved.

3) Testing - We need a _lot_ of help testing. If you have not previously tested CVS HEAD, please download it, read the UPGRADE.txt file and install it on one or more systems to play around with. Please do _not_ put it into a production environment unless you are willing to accept the consequences of that action. If you do find a bug or other issue, when you open a bug in Mantis, please try to provide _all_ the configuration information, call traces, etc. that the bug guidelines request, so that we don't waste 3-4 days just going back and forth requesting more information from you. If possible, join the #asterisk or #asterisk-dev IRC channel to find out exactly what debugging information will be required and how to produce it, if you don't already have that knowledge.

4) Release Candidates - I will produce the first release candidate on August 20th, with followup versions produced every week until we deem the release ready for public consumption. I expect it will require at least three -RC releases for us to get things in shape, so that means that 1.2 itself may be ready by September 15th.

We are very thankful for the community's help and support, and we want Asterisk 1.2 to be as important a release as 1.0 itself was. The number of new features, performance improvements, bug fixes and interoperability enhancements in CVS HEAD is astonishing, and a very large percentage of them came directly from community contributions. We hope that all of the 'non-developers' in the community will be able to help us 'shake out' the bugs and problems remaining in the code, so we can be assured of the most stable 1.2 release possible :-)