> > I wonder if there are any major obstacles for upgrading. >From our perspective I'd have to say package management.
We manage a *lot* of asterisk boxes at client locations at the end of DSL connections. We have a schedule to make sure each box is updated once a month (e.g. "these 10 boxes are updated in week 1 by Marcus, then in week 5 by Tom, etc."). If we can login and run a couple of simple commands to bring everything up to date, that saves us many hours every month. For better or worse, we generally use Gentoo Linux on our servers. With one command (emerge -DuavN world) I can bring a box completely up to date. Asterisk 1.2's portage packages are generally stable and fairly up-to-date. So, doing a portage update automatically upgrades asterisk, zaptel, libpri, speex and any other relevant packages at the same time as updating other core system libraries. Installing 1.4 is a pain. The individual installers for each relevant package have to be grabbed from Digium (or a mirror), then saved somewhere, then untarred, then ./configure'd, then made, then installed. And in a month's time if something's been updated, the procedure has to be repeated. It changes updating a server from a 5 minute operation into an hour or so. Yeah, part of it's laziness, but it's more about efficient use of employee time. If 1.2 does what the client needs and 1.4 would require many times the admin time, it isn't happening. In terms of fixing it - Digium could perhaps consider providing packages for the common *nix distros, which would be updated by them when new versions are released. We could then add the Digium "layer" (as it's referred under portage, other package managers probably call it something different) and it would be sync'd at the same time as the main distro portage tree. This is something I'd consider paying an annual subscription for. Regards, Chris -- C.M. Bagnall, Director, Minotaur I.T. Limited For full contact details visit http://www.minotaur.it This email is made from 100% recycled electrons _______________________________________________ --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
