Steve Totaro wrote: > 1.0 is over-ripe or rotten/forgotten and thrown away. Besides, we all > know that 1.0 was just a marketing ploy to legitimize Asterisk. What > serious company is going to install 1.BETA2 or .90? Maybe a > nonessential piece of software but not something as mission critical as > a PBX.
A marketing ploy? Are you serious? Asterisk 1.0 was the point in time where there were more than enough people using Asterisk in production to justify maintaining feature frozen releases. It meant that those people no longer had to use the development code on their production machines and could start focusing on a release that wasn't a moving target. I maintained Asterisk 1.0 for about a year and a half through my own personal *volunteer* efforts. It was absolutely not a Marketing ploy, as I didn't get paid for those nights that I stayed up all night reviewing the bug fixes that Mark had been making in the development code so that I could backport them. > 1.2 is sitting at the fresh fruit market. It is a nice peach color, > soft, sweet and juicy, most of the bad peaches have been discarded such > as worm and bug infestations. It has been aged perfectly. > > 1.4 is still a bunch of peaches on the tree. It is far from ripe and is > still very green. It is prime lunch for bugs, worms, and other > infestation which will not get sorted out until they get ready for the > market. Mmm ... peaches. Anyway, this transition from Asterisk 1.2 to 1.4 has been a very interesting learning experience. We will definitely benefit from all of this when it comes around to the next time that we do a major release. I have really come to understand the different expectations of stability that people have of their phone system versus other software. The transition between 1.0 and 1.2 was a different animal. There were some really major features added between 1.0 and 1.2 that a lot of people decided it was worth running the development tree to get as opposed to waiting for 1.2 to be released. The realtime configuration architecture is one example. So, 1.2 got a lot more production use before it was actually released, and there wasn't quite the same flood of people all starting to use it at once like we have had with 1.4. Now, with Asterisk 1.4, I think we have a couple of challenges. We have the fact that there are now a *lot* more installations out there than there was at the time of 1.2 being released as the project is growing rapidly. Also, I think a lot more people have been content with the feature set of 1.2 and haven't been as eager to upgrade. So, 1.4 didn't receive as much production use before it got officially released. It has hurt a bit during the early months of 1.4 as we started dealing with various major issues. I would also like to note that the development team did recognize the difference in the situation we had at hand. These are the exact reasons we decided to fully maintain Asterisk 1.2 during the first 6 months of the life of 1.4. When Asterisk 1.2 was released, 1.0 was immediately deprecated and only maintained with security fixes. I am now feeling very good about Asterisk 1.4. When we had our developer conference in May, we talked about a lot of cool things. However, we also talked about how it must be a priority that we fix bugs and decided to work extremely hard on bugs for the Summer. We lived up to our word. The past few months have seen a *ton* of serious issues get resolved, and I am very pleased with our progress. To the whole user community, thank you very much for your support and patience with us as we push Asterisk forward. Feel confident that we will not leave you hanging. We will continue to do whatever we can to make Asterisk stable as we further improve functionality. If the changing needs of the user community mean that Asterisk 1.4 needs to be maintained for a full year after 1.6 is released, then so be it. Thanks for reading, -- Russell Bryant Software Engineer Digium, Inc. _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users