hi

without wanting to start up last week discussions i thought this might be useful ------------------------------------- HEAD and STABLE In the early development of Asterisk, there was a single branch. Releases were few and far between, and the generally accepted way to obtain and use Asterisk was via CVS. While this is fine for people developing Asterisk, the others who wished to run the software in a production environment sometimes had to contend with broken branches, and not really sure what they were getting from one day to the next.

At Astricon (http://www.astricon.net), the first official STABLE version 1.0 was released. The STABLE branch was born.

Now there were two separate branches of Asterisk. There was HEAD which the developers would use to test patches and new features, and there was STABLE, which people could run in production and where only bug fixes and proven features could be ported over.

However this caused two independent versions of code. While this is good for stability, reliability and development, it also doubles the development overhead. Every bug fix which is submitted and resolved on the bug tracker (http://bugs.digium.com) must then be ported to the stable branch. And the longer that the development and stable branches co-exist, the more diverse their code bases become. This can cause patches which apply cleanly to HEAD to not apply to STABLE. This is where the Asterisk Development Proxy comes in.

Russell Bryant is the maintainer of the STABLE branch, and thus, must port every single resolved bug from HEAD into STABLE. This is an enormous under taking, and the purpose of formation of the Asterisk Development Proxy. Many of these patches can be ported from HEAD to STABLE with basic or average coding skills. It is also an excellent opportunity for developers unfamiliar with the Asterisk code base to get involved and help with something while they are getting their feet wet.

So join the Asterisk Development Proxy and Asterisk Documentation Project team and get involved with Asterisk today!

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