From the update:

===== Project Background =====

Writing documentation is a huge job. Every time that someone has gone to write documentation on Asterisk, part of the task is always to take the information from “core show application ” or “core show function ” and convert it to some other format. This documentation has been maintained in the source code in a raw string format, and there has been no programmatic way to extract it from the source. This project aimed to improve that situation.

While Asterisk 1.6.0 was in the beta and release candidate stage, the development team was also working on merging new things for Asterisk 1.6.1. Now that 1.6.0 has been released, the testing cycle for Asterisk 1.6.1 has begun.

To see the list of new features in Asterisk 1.6.1, see the CHANGES file:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/branches/1.6.1/CHANGES?view=markup

For a full list of changes that have gone into the development of Asterisk 1.6.1 so far, see the ChangeLog:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.1-beta1/ChangeLog?view=markup

To download Asterisk 1.6.1-beta1, visit the Digium downloads site:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/

Please report all issues to the issue tracker, http://bugs.digium.com/.

Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!

For Asterisk 1.6.0, we included a document that describes every C level API change between Asterisk 1.4 and Asterisk 1.6. For more information, see the file doc/api-1.6.0-changes.odt in the Asterisk 1.6.0 tarball.

=================================================================
=== Asterisk 1.4.22 =============================================
=================================================================

Asterisk 1.4.22 includes a large number of bug fixes for the 1.4 release series of Asterisk. 1.4.22 also includes support for DAHDI. For more information about the transition from Zaptel to DAHDI, please see the following help file:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.4.22/Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt?view=markup

For a full listing of changes in this release, see the ChangeLog:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.4.22/ChangeLog?view=markup

Asterisk 1.4.22 is available for immediate download from the Digium downloads site:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-1.4.22.tar.gz

=================================================================
=================================================================

=================================================================
=== Asterisk 1.6.0 ==============================================
=================================================================

Asterisk 1.6.0 is the first official release of Asterisk 1.6.

—————————————————————–
— Upgrade Information —————————————–
—————————————————————–

Asterisk 1.6 no longer supports Zaptel. It only contains support for DAHDI. For more information on this transition, please see the following help file:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0/Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt?view=markup

There are a number of other important changes to be aware of when upgrading to Asterisk 1.6.0 from previous versions of Asterisk. For a listing of those things, please see UPGRADE.txt:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0/UPGRADE.txt?view=markup

—————————————————————–
— New Features ————————————————
—————————————————————–

Asterisk 1.6.0 contains new features that were not previously available in an Asterisk release. For a full listing of the features that are included in Asterisk 1.6.0, please see the CHANGES file:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0/CHANGES?view=markup

A verbose listing of each individual change that was made in the development of Asterisk 1.6.0 is also available:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0/ChangeLog?view=markup

—————————————————————–
— Release Management ——————————————
—————————————————————–

The Asterisk.org development team has decided on a new release management style for Asterisk 1.6. Previously, a release series was strictly feature frozen for its entire lifetime. The release management guidelines for Asterisk 1.6 were inspired by the Linux Kernel, among a
number of other projects.

Asterisk 1.6 is not feature frozen. Features will be added in point releases. However, effort will be made to ensure that the number of large changes is minimized in a single point release. Even as 1.6.0 is being released, the Asterisk development team is already working on what new things will be in 1.6.1 and beyond. To take a look ahead to see what features have been added for releases that have not yet been made, take a look at the trunk version of the CHANGES file:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/trunk/CHANGES?view=markup

Even though new features will be added in point releases of Asterisk 1.6, that does not mean that any deprecated functionality will be removed as has been done between major releases in the past. In fact,
we have decided that maintaining backwards compatibility is of the utmost importance for configuration and external interfaces. C API and ABI compatibility is not guaranteed between point releases. However, things like dialplan applications, functions, and AGI commands will not disappear just because there is a new and better way to accomplish the same thing.

With Asterisk 1.4, once Asterisk 1.4.N is released, Asterisk 1.4.X is no longer supported, where X < N. With Asterisk 1.6, the development team plans to maintain a total of 3 releases at a time. For example, the development team will support Asterisk 1.6.0, 1.6.1, and 1.6.2 until 1.6.3 is released. This means that for the time that 1.6.0 is supported, there may be 1.6.0.1, 1.6.0.2, etc. releases that include fixes for regressions found in 1.6.0.

With Asterisk 1.4, the goal has been to make releases every 4 to 6 weeks. With Asterisk 1.6, we aim to release updates in a similar time frame, but it is likely that it will be closer to 6 to 8 weeks for Asterisk 1.6 due to a more strict beta and release candidate testing cycle for each point release.

The number of releases supported and release time frames are not yet set in stone. The development team is interested in adjusting these policies to help meet the desires of the Asterisk community.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
--- Download ----------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Asterisk 1.6.0 is available for immediate download from the Digium downloads site:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/asterisk-1.6.0.tar.gz

—————————————————————–
— Reporting Issues ——————————————–
—————————————————————–

The bug tracking process is one of the best places to get started in the Asterisk development community. Please report all issues to http://bugs.digium.com/. Live discussion about current issues is done on the Freenode IRC network, in the #asterisk-bugs or #asterisk-dev channels.

=================================================================
=================================================================

Thank you very much for your continued support of the Asterisk project!

I am feeling especially motivated this year to make good use of the Astricon Code Zone. I seem to do well at working on development projects while I travel. Part of it is probably breaking out of my normal routine. Some of it is because I am stuck on an airplane for hours with nothing to distract me. This time, most of it is because I will be immersed in a very high concentration of Asterisk geeks for a week!

I have been trying to get some thoughts together about what things I would like to work on while I’m there. Here are some things on my mind.

• Video on Hold - Someone on the asterisk-users mailing list asked if this was supported in Asterisk. It currently is not. However, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be that hard to add. I have already written a rough draft. I plan to get it tested and finished up in the code zone.
• SIP Performance - One thing that could be done to improve the performance in chan_sip is to make processing multi-threaded. I have stage 1 of this process completed, which is to run the SIP scheduler in its own thread. I would like to load test this code some more, as well as multi-thread packet processing. I have learned a _lot_ from the long and painful process of making chan_iax2 multi-threaded, so I think this will go over much smoother. Early load testing of the scheduler optimization on a multi-core machine by Joshua Colp showed a performance improvement of 300%!!! I was blown away. Hopefully we can put together some more details about these test cases soon. These results give me a lot of motivation to move forward with completing this work.
• Distributed Call Queues - We have been talking about this one for years. It keeps coming back up. Some of the needed prerequisites, like distributed device state, are now in place. I have talked to a number of people about what this functionality needs to look like, and I think we’re ready to start developing the framework for it. Lately, Josh has been expressing interest in this, as well. So, we will likely work on this together on the trip.

If anyone has thoughts on things they would like to work on or talk about in the code zone, please share them!

I’ll see you at Astricon.

So, after a year of focus on the Asterisk code, I’m ready to get out and meet up with the Asterisk community. I will be spending as much time as possible in the code zone. I love hearing all of the stories of success and new Asterisk applications that I have never thought of. I get most of my inspiration for what new things to work on from these discussions at Astricon. I want to find great ideas, as well as the people that can help conceptualize and bring them to reality. I hope to see you there, so that I can hear your story, and your ideas, as well.

This update for Zaptel includes a fix for an issue that would cause the build to fail if no firmware was selected to be installed. For a full list of changes, see the ChangeLog:

http://svn.digium.com/view/zaptel/tags/1.4.12.1/ChangeLog?view=markup

The Asterisk release candidates include fixes for a few crashes, as well as some less serious fixes. For a full list of changes in these release candidates, please see the appropriate ChangeLog:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.4.22-rc5/ChangeLog?view=markup

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0-rc6/ChangeLog?view=markup

These Asterisk versions also include the transition from Zaptel to DAHDI. For more information about this transition, please see the information in this previous release announcement:

http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-announce/2008-September/000163.html

Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!

For more information on the reasoning behind the transition to DAHDI, please see the following post:

http://blogs.digium.com/2008/05/19/zaptel-project-being-renamed-to-dahdi/

The list of packages released today includes:

• dahdi-linux 2.0.0-rc4
• dahdi-linux-complete 2.0.0-rc4+2.0.0-rc2
• asterisk 1.4.22-rc4
• asterisk 1.6.0-rc5

All of these packages are available on http://downloads.digium.com in their respective directories. Detailed information about each package release is included below.

=== dahdi-linux-complete-2.0.0-rc3+2.0.0-rc2 ===

This release combines dahdi-linux-2.0.0-rc4 and dahdi-tools-2.0.0-rc2 into a single download, one-package installation process, so that users who are installing DAHDI for the first time don’t have to download and install the dahdi-linux and dahdi-tools packages separately.

=== dahdi-linux-2.0.0-rc4 ===

This is a release candidate of the DAHDI Linux kernel modules package, which replaces the kernel modules components of Zaptel. It contains all the functionality of Zaptel 1.4 plus many improvements, but also has some old (generally unsupported) functionality from Zaptel removed, including (but not limited to):

• Support for Linux 2.4.x kernels
• Support for devfs dynamic device filesystems
• The ‘torisa’ and ‘wcusb’ drivers

Information on upgrading from Zaptel to DAHDI can be found in the included UPGRADE.txt file, which can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/dahdi/linux/tags/2.0.0-rc4/UPGRADE.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/dahdi-linux/releases/ChangeLog-2.0.0-rc4

=== asterisk-1.4.22-rc4 ===

This release candidate includes a large number of bug fixes and also is the first release of Asterisk 1.4 that includes support for DAHDI, the package that is replacing Zaptel. This version of Asterisk can be built against *either* Zaptel or DAHDI, but since Zaptel 1.4.12 is the last release of Zaptel 1.4, users are encouraged to transition to DAHDI as soon as they can, so that they will be able to continue to receive bug fixes and other improvements.

Information on how the transition from Zaptel to DAHDI affects this Asterisk release can be found in the included Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt file, which can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.4.22-rc4/Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/ChangeLog-1.4.22-rc4

=== asterisk-1.6.0-rc5 ===

This version of Asterisk contains a large number of enhancements and improvements over Asterisk 1.4, which can be found in the included CHANGES file, and read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0-rc5/CHANGES?view=co

*All* users who install this version of Asterisk are strongly encouraged to read the UPGRADE.txt file to learn about changes that affect compatibility with previous versions of Asterisk; this file can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0-rc5/UPGRADE.txt?view=co

Information on how the transition from Zaptel to DAHDI affects this Asterisk release can be found in the included Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt file, which can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0-rc5/Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/ChangeLog-1.6.0-rc5

=== ===

Thank you for your continued support of the Asterisk project!

This is a set of coordinated releases intended to begin the transition from Zaptel to DAHDI; for the reasons why this is being done, please see:

http://blogs.digium.com/2008/05/19/zaptel-project-being-renamed-to-dahdi/

The list of packages released today includes:

• zaptel 1.2.27
• zaptel 1.4.12
• dahdi-linux 2.0.0-rc3
• dahdi-tools 2.0.0-rc2
• dahdi-linux-complete 2.0.0-rc3+2.0.0-rc2
• asterisk 1.4.22-rc3
• asterisk 1.6.0-rc4
• asterisk-addons 1.6.0-rc1

All of these packages are available on http://downloads.digium.com in their respective directories. Detailed information about each package release is included below.

=== zaptel-1.2.27 ===

This will be the final release of Zaptel made from the 1.2 release branch. This release includes a number of bug fixes and other improvements, most notably compatibility with the 2.6.26 and 2.6.27
kernels and a fix for wctdm driver (for TDM400P cards) that corrects a problem introduced in 1.2.26 that caused FXO ports to not properly recognize incoming calls.

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/zaptel/releases/ChangeLog-1.2.27

=== zaptel-1.4.12 ===

This will be the final release of Zaptel made from the 1.4 release branch. This release includes a number of bugs fixes and other improvements, including the changes that are listed above for the Zaptel
1.2.27 release.

In addition, there are two major changes in this release:

- Support for the Digium TC400B transcoder card has been completely rewritten, and the API used by Asterisk (or any other application) to the card has been changed significantly. The result of this work is that the transcoder interface is more reliable and stable, and it supports variable-sized G.729 frames (including G.729B silence detection frames). However, that means that any Asterisk user using a TC400B who wants to upgrade to this version of Zaptel must *also* upgrade their version of
Asterisk to one of the releases included in this announcement; older versions of Asterisk will not be able to use the transcoder support in this release of Zaptel.

- To help users make the transition to DAHDI (and especially if they need to move back to Zaptel for some reason), this version of Zaptel contains installation steps that will *uninstall* the important parts of DAHDI if they are present on the system during the ‘make install’ step. This will allow a user to ’switch back’ to Zaptel from DAHDI without having to manually uninstall any portions of DAHDI.

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/zaptel/releases/ChangeLog-1.4.12

=== dahdi-linux-complete-2.0.0-rc3+2.0.0-rc2 ===

This release combines dahdi-linux-2.0.0-rc3 and dahdi-tools-2.0.0-rc2 into a single download, one-package installation process, so that users who are installing DAHDI for the first time don’t have to download and install the dahdi-linux and dahdi-tools packages separately.

=== dahdi-linux-2.0.0-rc3 ===

This is the first release candidate of the DAHDI Linux kernel modules package, which replaces the kernel modules components of Zaptel. It contains all the functionality of Zaptel 1.4 plus many improvements, but also has some old (generally unsupported) functionality from Zaptel removed, including (but not limited to):

• Support for Linux 2.4.x kernels
• Support for devfs dynamic device filesystems
• The ‘torisa’ and ‘wcusb’ drivers

Information on upgrading from Zaptel to DAHDI can be found in the included UPGRADE.txt file, which can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/dahdi/linux/tags/2.0.0-rc3/UPGRADE.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/dahdi-linux/releases/ChangeLog-2.0.0-rc3

=== dahdi-tools-2.0.0-rc2 ===

This is the first release candidate of the DAHDI userspace tools package, which replaces the userspace components of Zaptel. It contains all the functionality of Zaptel 1.4 plus many improvements.

Information on upgrading from Zaptel to DAHDI can be found in the included UPGRADE.txt file, which can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/dahdi/tools/tags/2.0.0-rc2/UPGRADE.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/dahdi-tools/releases/ChangeLog-2.0.0-rc2

=== asterisk-1.4.22-rc3 ===

This release candidate includes a large number of bug fixes and also is the first release of Asterisk 1.4 that includes support for DAHDI, the package that is replacing Zaptel. This version of Asterisk can be built against *either* Zaptel or DAHDI, but since Zaptel 1.4.12 is the last release of Zaptel 1.4, users are encouraged to transition to DAHDI as soon as they can, so that they will be able to continue to receive bug fixes and other improvements.

Information on how the transition from Zaptel to DAHDI affects this Asterisk release can be found in the included Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt file, which can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.4.22-rc3/Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/ChangeLog-1.4.22-rc3

=== asterisk-1.6.0-rc4 ===

This release candidate marks the transition of the Asterisk 1.6 release branch from ‘beta’ status to ‘release candidate’ status, signifying that it is nearing final release. This version of Asterisk contains a large number of enhancements and improvements over Asterisk 1.4, which can be found in the included CHANGES file, and read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0-rc4/CHANGES?view=co

*All* users who install this version of Asterisk are strongly encouraged to read the UPGRADE.txt file to learn about changes that affect compatibility with previous versions of Asterisk; this file can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0-rc4/UPGRADE.txt?view=co

Information on how the transition from Zaptel to DAHDI affects this Asterisk release can be found in the included Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt file, which can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/tags/1.6.0-rc4/Zaptel-to-DAHDI.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/ChangeLog-1.6.0-rc4

=== asterisk-addons-1.6.0-rc1 ===

This release candidate marks the transition of the Asterisk-Addons 1.6 release branch from ‘beta’ status to ‘release candidate’ status, signifying that it is nearing final release. This version of
Asterisk-Addons contains a Bluetooth device channel driver called chan_mobile, as well as a number of smaller improvements to existing modules.

*All* users who install this version of Asterisk-Addons are strongly encouraged to read the UPGRADE.txt file to learn about changes that affect compatibility with previous versions of Asterisk-Addons; this
file can also be read here:

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk-addons/tags/1.6.0-rc1/UPGRADE.txt?view=co

The change log for this release is here:

http://downloads.digium.com/pub/telephony/asterisk/releases/ChangeLog-addons-1.6.0-rc1

=== ===

Thank you for your continued support of the Asterisk project!