Greetings Everyone!
Another year has flown by and while we now live in interesting times this has not stopped the development and progress of Asterisk or the Astricon conference[1], so much so that the first release candidate of Asterisk 18 is here[2].
The first step in creating the 18.0.0 release of Asterisk is tagging a release candidate: asterisk-18.0.0-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 18 to start testing and evaluating this and any future release candidates. Any bugs found should be reported to issues.asterisk.org.
Asterisk 18 is an LTS version of Asterisk, meaning that it has a long life ahead of itself with many installations. This makes it even more important that it is tested so please if you are able please do so and report any issues so we can ensure it is the best it can be when the 18.0.0 is released. I also urge you to keep on top of Asterisk versions and support lifetimes on our wiki[3].
I would also like to say that after proposing a new release strategy for new major versions on the Asterisk developer list this is the first year we will be trying it. This new strategy means we have waited longer than usual before creating asterisk-18.0.0-rc1 allowing it to remain in bug fix parity with the other versions of Asterisk. We have also created release candidates of the other Asterisk versions which will be released at the same time as 18.0.0 ensuring that everyone has the same set of bug fixes. In the past it was possible for the new major version to be out of sync with existing versions resulting in bug fixes being missing, which is something we are now fixing.
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! 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, exciting information about Asterisk 18!
[2] https://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/asterisk-18.0.0-rc1.tar.gz
[3] https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Versions
