Asterisk: The Future of Telephony

Obtaining the Source Code

The Asterisk source code can be obtained either through FTP or CVS. We will show you how to acquire the source with both methods, although you only need to use one of them to retrieve the packages (FTP is the preferred method).

Obtaining Asterisk Source Code from FTP

The Asterisk source code can be obtained from the Digium FTP server, located at ftp://ftp.digium.com. The easiest way to obtain the stable release is through the use of the program wget.

Stable and Head

Asterisk comes in two different flavors, generally referred to as stable and head. Stable, as the name implies, is the established branch of Asterisk for use in production systems. The head branch is what the developers use to test new features and bug fixes .

Bug fixes (not features) are merged over to the stable branch after a reasonable period of testing. It is entirely possible that the development branch may be broken at certain points during testing; thus, the stable branch is what you will want to run your production system on, and it is what we will be using throughout this book.

You can obtain stable releases via FTP. Both the stable and head branches of Asterisk can also be obtained from CVS, as explained later in this chapter. However, it is important to note the difference between releases and CVS. Releases are snapshots from the stable CVS tree, tagged with a version number and released via the FTP server when a new stable release is deemed ready. Note that the stable CVS branch is