> There are many new features and core changes in the 1.4 branch that
> introduce an exponential amount of new, possibly untested situations
> that could cause serious issues in production systems. As an example,
> all of the race conditions and deadlocks that have been fixed due to
> the increased focus on using tools like SIPP, as well as Murph's focus
> on stabilizing AEL, not to mention all of the VLDTMF related issues
> that have been squashed. The IAX2 changes have also been a sorely
> needed update as well.
The larger community can do our part by using tools like SIPP to test
the patched 1.4.x versions and report bugs. There are a lot of us using
Asterisk in production where we could test against real conditions than
there are those of us who can patch the code. Maybe if someone could
write a tool to parse real Asterisk logs into scripts for SIPP against a
test server, we could use all that real experience to more quickly
improve Asterisk with each of us has to offer the community, whether
coding or testing.
On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 23:20 -0500, Gregory Boehnlein wrote:
> > A tremendous amount of dev time has been spent in the latter half of
> > 2007 making 1.4 'more stable and reliable' because at the developer's
> > conference in mid-2007 it was determined that this is where the focus
> > needed to be. I've noticed the improvements and a survey taken in
> > another thread that happened recently seemed to indicate there were
> > others that have as well.
>
> I have been very encouraged to see the massive amount of effort being spent
> on getting 1.4 "production ready". There are many new features and core
> changes in the 1.4 branch that introduce an exponential amount of new,
> possibly untested situations that could cause serious issues in production
> systems. As an example, all of the race conditions and deadlocks that have
> been fixed due to the increased focus on using tools like SIPP, as well as
> Murph's focus on stabilizing AEL, not to mention all of the VLDTMF related
> issues that have been squashed. The IAX2 changes have also been a sorely
> needed update as well.
>
> > There were other contributors that also noted areas of improvement
> > that were still necessary to get 1.4 where we all want it to be, and
> > work still continues in this direction. Many of the astobj2 conversions
> > that happened in 1.4 happened because they were desperately needed to
> > put in proper reference use counts around objects that needed to be
> > protected because some thread somewhere was still using it resulting in
> > crashes and mutex deadlocks. You need only subscribe to the svn-commits
> > list to see all the activity that still occurs in the 1.4 branch. It's
> > not limited just to security fixes.
>
> Yeah.. I love seeing 4-5 patches a day happening to the PBX core, SIP
> channels, Zaptel and IAX drivers. Those are really the core of what I use
> Asterisk for, and those changes have really added to the stability of the
> pre-production boxes that I have in the field. The real litmus test for me
> will be happening in Q2 2008 when I rebuild some of my TDM gateways using 1.4.
>
> > Digium has made a conscious decision to stop patch support on 1.2 in
> > favor of focusing efforts around the active 'stable' branch and the
> > active 'development' branch. The community members there at the time of
> > the dev conference, myself being one of them, fully supported this move
> > knowing that even with what Digium already provides there is a finite
> > limit to the number of branches that can be supported at any given time
> > and the line had to be drawn in the sand somewhere.
>
> I'm in support of this move.. the 1.2 branch is very solid for the specific
> tasks that I'm using it for. I'm well aware of the issues that it has, and
> that makes it a solid, mature branch to use for my needs.
>
> > That being said, this is an open source project. I don't believe
> > there's anything at all that stops anyone out there from picking up
> > where Digium and others have decided to "leave off" and fork the 1.2
> > branch to allow it to stay active with patches and move it forward.
>
>
>
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(C) Matthew Rubenstein
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