[Serusers] forking stable, unstable....just a thought how it could be done

[Iqbal]

hi

without wanting to start up last week discussions i thought this might be
useful
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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!

Retrieved from "http://dev.asteriskdocs.org/index.php/HEAD_and_STABLE"
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Iqbal