System information

While the development team still wants to provide access to new features and core
changes on a more regular basis (every 12 months being the goal), there is recognition
that it is also good to provide long-term support to a stable, popular version of Asterisk.
You can think of the Asterisk 1.4 branch as being a long-term support (LTS) version.
The 1.6.0, 1.6.1, and 1.6.2 branches can be thought of as feature releases that continue
to receive bug fixes after release, but are supported for a shorter period of time (about
a year). The new LTS version is Asterisk 1.8 (what this book is based on); it will receive
bug fixes for four years and an additional year of security releases after that, providing
five years of support from the Digium development team.
During the long-term support phase of Asterisk 1.8, additional branches will be created
on a semi-regular basis as feature releases. These will be tagged as versions 1.10, 1.12,
and 1.14, respectively. Each of these branches will receive bug fixes for a period of one
year, and security releases will continue to be made for an additional year before the
branches are marked as EOL.
The current statuses of all Asterisk branches, their release dates, when they will go into
security release–only mode, and when they will reach EOL status are all documented
on the Asterisk wiki at https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Versions.
Conclusion
Asterisk is composed of many different technologies, most of which are complicated
in their own right. As such, the understanding of Asterisk architecture can be over-
whelming. Still, the reality is that Asterisk is well-designed for what it does and, in our
opinion, has achieved remarkable balance between flexibility and complexity.
28 | Chapter 2: Asterisk Architecture