Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Obtaining the Source Code

The best place to get source code for Asterisk and it’s packages is directly from the http://www.asterisk.org web site or FTP server.

Release Versus Trunk

The Asterisk code base is under a constant state of change. Developers use a sofware revision tool called Subversion (SVN)^[44] to manage the code base. Subversion allows a community of developers to collaborate with each other on complex programming projects.

There are two main areas where Asterisk is developed, and these are referred to as the Branch and the Trunk. In the Trunk, new features, architectural changes, and any of the brand-new stuff that is going on is performed. This place in the code base contains all the new toys, but at any time can be in a nonworking state, and is absolutely forbidden from production use (see figure).

Just like a tree, a Trunk will have Branches. These Branches have the major revision numbers such as 1.0, 1.2, and 1.4 (in the future we will likely see 1.6, 1.8, 1.8.2, 1.8.4. 1.8.6, 1.8.8. 1.8.8.2…um…etc…).^[45] Within the Branch there are no major architectural changes or new features—simply bug and security fixes. In a production environment, stability is far more important than feature evolution.

Roughly every 14 months (although Asterisk does not follow a formal release timeline like many commercial software packages), a version of Asterisk is released intended for use in ...