Is This List Dead? Or The Project?

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Asterisk Users 6 Comments

Hi,

I’m tinkering with Asterisk for * for about 12 years now and since about
10 years, it’s my home PBX. I was off the list for something like 7
years – had other things to do. But… I remember, then, sometimes came over 1000 mails in 24h. Now it’s hardly 50 new mails per week. Is the list dead? Or is the project dead?
Or is nobody tinkering any more and everybody buying some turnkey-stuff?

Just wondering…

-S

6 thoughts on - Is This List Dead? Or The Project?

  • Stefan Gofferje wrote:

    It’s called being a mature project. And, I don’t call averaging 400
    messages a month as being a dead list.

    And, once I’ve got several stable systems in production, I don’t mess with them much.

    Doug

  • It works, there is documentation and you can Google most of the things that you are going to run into, if you don’t want to read the docs. The GUI interfaces mostly work if you want to support analog, SIP and VoIP.

  • Plus, some traffic got split off into the app-dev list (and there’s the dev list).

    -Justin

  • I can’t speak for other readers, but from a personal point of view, improvements in Asterisk stability and documentation have lead me to read this list (or write to) much less frequently.

  • Olivier wrote:

    It’s cool to hear that 😉

    To give some exposure into what has made this possible (since not everyone follows development):

    1. Code reviews were added

    Every remotely complex change to Asterisk now goes through code review to give more people a chance to provide feedback. This has caught a lot of issues before the change has even been put into the tree.

    2. Tests

    Test all the things! We’ve added tons of tests to cover lots of stuff to make sure that we don’t break existing functionality. This has caught regressions and issues before Asterisk is released. Do we have tests for everything? Not yet, but we’re working on it.

    3. Documentation is in the tree

    Long ago the documentation for certain stuff in Asterisk was placed into the source code as XML. This has been extended over time to include documentation for more types of stuff (manager events for example) and in some cases we now *require* documentation or Asterisk will just not load. This is an ongoing process but has helped. This XML gets pulled out and automatically updated on the wiki[1] as well.

    4. We’ve built frameworks internally

    A good foundation for Asterisk has helped stability and development. We have solid frameworks for common things that are used everywhere and are continuing to add more.

    This has been an evolution to make Asterisk better for everyone, and it has certainly worked with the help of all Asterisk developers and contributors.

    So at the beginning of my email I mentioned about not everyone following development. If you are on Twitter and want to see the big things there’s an AsteriskDev[2] account that I tweet things out on. Asterisk releases, new additions, major changes, conferences Asterisk developers are speaking at, that sort of thing.

    [1] http://wiki.asterisk.org/
    [2] http://twitter.com/AsteriskDev

    Cheers,