Greetings Everyone!
Time flies when you are having fun and improving Asterisk; this past year has been no different. October and Astricon [1] are fast approaching; and, thus, the first release candidate of Asterisk is here [2].
The first step in creating the 17.0.0 release of Asterisk is tagging a release candidate: asterisk-17.0.0-rc1. This tag contains all of the new features and all of the bug fixes that have been included in the master branch over the past year. While the growth of the automated test suite for Asterisk has made each release of Asterisk more and more stable, it is still important that users test release candidates so that anything missed by automation can be discovered before the first, official release. We urge all of you who plan on using Asterisk 17 to start testing and evaluating this and any future release candidates. Any bugs found should be reported to issues.asterisk.org.
As Asterisk 16 is an LTS version of Asterisk, Asterisk 17 is a standard, non-LTS version of Asterisk. Despite a shorter lifecycle than the LTS-versions, we urge you to test Asterisk 17. Testing non-LTS versions of Asterisk allows you to uncover potential problems within your environment so that they can be resolved before the next LTS version is released. For more information about the various version types of Asterisk, see [3].
As always, we extend a great deal of thanks to all of the many Asterisk community members for providing so much help and support to make Asterisk the wonderful open source project it is – now 20 years old! As I’ve participated in the project for numerous years, I have seen what a huge amount of effort on the part of many, many individuals that it takes to support the rich developer and user communities that surround Asterisk. Thank you *so* much for your passion and your support for the project.
Best wishes to all, happy testing, and stay tuned for more, existing information about Asterisk 17!
[1] – http://www.astricon.net
[2] – https://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/asterisk-17.0.0-rc1.tar.gz
[3] – https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Versions
