Greetings Everyone!
It seems like it was just a month or two ago that I was thinking about Asterisk 18, but now time has flown by and the first release candidate of Asterisk 19[1] is here!
The first step in creating the 19.0.0 release of Asterisk is tagging a release candidate: asterisk-19.0.0-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 19 to start testing and evaluating this and any future release candidates. Any bugs found should be reported to issues.asterisk.org.
Take note that Asterisk 19 is a standard release version of Asterisk, meaning that it will have a year of bug fixes followed by a final year of security fixes. As always I urge you to keep on top of Asterisk versions and support lifetimes on our wiki[2].
You may have also noticed that we are continuing the new release strategy initially adopted last year by waiting to create the release candidate until closer to release. This worked out quite well for us last year and this will continue to be the strategy going forward.
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. I’d also like to take this opportunity to remind you that Astricon[3] is virtual again this year! This makes it even more accessible to the community, so I urge you to partake in it. You may even see a presentation done by myself!
Best wishes to all, happy testing, and stay tuned for more content on this blog!
[1] https://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/asterisk-19.0.0-rc1.tar.gz
[2] https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Versions
