I think Michael and Karl are talking across each other a little here. Michael is talking about getting FS' modifications to dependencies upstream and moving away from forked versions. Karl is talking about the benefits of being in distro package repos. These are different but related (as in one appears to be dependent on the other). As for the issue of backporting fixes to old releases of Debian: part of what I like about the FS project is its balancing of development velocity and stability. Sometimes the project gets this wrong: the versioning scheme having questionable (if any) semantic value, no automated integration testing (to my knowledge), etc, I think overall FS gets very close to striking the right balance between getting things fixed quickly and not being too difficult to upgrade safely. This is something Asterisk gets wrong by obsessing about maintaining bugs (such as DTMF keypresses killing a bridge...) and calling it "backward compatibility". While some extra safeguards for true BC would be nice (SemVer, testing), I don't think supporting versions several years old would be a good thing for the open source community. Of course, if someone were to package "FreeSWITCH LTS", I'm sure there would be a market for it, but this isn't something I think the core team should be fretting over at the cost of core development effort. On 9 September 2013 17:21, Michael Jerris <mike@jerris.com> wrote:
I look forward to seeing anyone step up and work on getting patches upstream so we can have a productive conversation on this topic.
On Sep 9, 2013, at 3:50 PM, Karl Schmidt <karl@xtronics.com> wrote:
On 09/09/2013 07:12 AM, Michael Jerris wrote:
Thats correct, every time someone comes around suggesting we get package in the distro repos, I mention this needs to get done first and if someone wants to do the work on that then we can discuss what else is necessary to get packages upstream, and them everyone realizes its a lot of work and wanders off without offering to help, so it probably will never happen. I'm not sure it actually adds any value anyways.
Actually, it adds a huge amount of value. Just the security implications alone are a huge deal. I think the fact that asterisk being in the distribution is a pretty big hint.
The freeswitch user base would increase greatly which translates into more eyes on the code - which translates into more man power etc. etc.
I can give an example of this effect - kicad, a PCB layout package, entered Debian - with-in the year they had a multiplication of programmer man power. It has been a huge success.
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