The Asterisk.org development team has released Asterisk versions 1.4.20-rc3 and 1.6.0-beta9.

These releases are intended to encourage community testing to improve the quality of the upcoming 1.4.20 and 1.6.0 releases. The testing process has proven extremely useful and we would like to thank everyone who has participated. Please help continue the effort. Any issues with test releases should be reported to http://bugs.digium.com/ or discussed on the asterisk-dev mailing list.

Both releases are available for download from the Digium downloads site.

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

Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!

The Asterisk.org development team has released Asterisk version 1.4.19.2.

This release includes some IAX2 channel driver updates. Asterisk 1.4.19.1 was released to address an IAX2 security vulnerability. Unfortunately, the changes to address the security issue had an unfortunate negative impact on IAX2 performance in Asterisk. These issues have been addressed and the related fixes are included in this release. The performance of IAX2 in Asterisk due to these changes should be far better than it was even before the changes were made for the security issue.

Anyone that uses IAX2 should use this release instead of 1.4.19.1.

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

Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!

Tilghman has posted his musings on bringing back deprecated applications:

So I've been thinking about some of the recent criticism we've gotten about deprecating applications in 1.2 (deprecation warnings that it seems that everybody ignored), and subsequently removing the applications in 1.4. The reason we did that was because we found better ways to express concepts in the dialplan, so we naturally wanted people to move to the better ways. Since we've gotten a lot of flack for that decision, I am floating the idea of reintroducing those applications in 1.4, and possibly of never removing dialplan applications at all.

To deal with the amount of possible extra applications floating around, I am proposing setting up these applications so that they are by default unselected for building, but may be reenabled very easily via the menuselect system. Note that menuselect allows you to set up a configuration file in your home directory, which would allow you to save your preferences as to which applications will be automatically selected when you download a new release and install.

The reason we would like to unselect by default the old applications is twofold: first, we would like to keep the default footprint small, and second, we would like to continue to encourage new users to use the newer methods.

Additionally, after some internal discussions at Digium, we are proposing that these deprecated applications will get bugfixes and security fixes, but no new features.

I am putting this out there in front of the community of developers to get some feedback before we try implementing this. I'm sure I haven't thought of everything, so I hope we can have a discussion about this proposal.

--
Tilghman

Matthew Fredrickson has posted details on which version of libpri to use with Asterisk 1.6:

Public Service Announcement :-)

Just to make it clear to everyone who may be confused by the recent libpri activity (removal of the 1.6.0-beta tarball and links, among other things), a mistake was made when the libpri-1.6.0-beta tarball was created.

We are not planning on releasing a 1.6 version of libpri, but instead you need to use the recently released version 1.4.4 of libpri with Asterisk 1.6. There were not big enough changes for Asterisk 1.6 to require a major ABI change release of libpri, so instead most of the 1.6 specific functions were back ported to the 1.4 branch of libpri (including BRI support, as well as a few other things such as TBCT for Q.SIG)

For Zaptel, you still only need a 1.4 release.

Hope that clears the air a bit for anyone out there who were not aware of what was going on.

--
Matthew Fredrickson
Software/Firmware Engineer
Digium, Inc.

The Asterisk development team has released Asterisk version 1.4.20-rc2.

This release is a release candidate for the upcoming official release of 1.4.20. It includes a fix for a SIP channel driver regression introduced in 1.4.20-rc1, among a number of other changes. For a full list of changes since the last release candidate, view the contents of the ChangeLog that is distributed with the release.

The release candidate is available on the download site.

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

Please provide release candidate testing feedback to the asterisk-dev mailing list, or the issue tracker, http://bugs.digium.com/.

Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!