Overview

For the most part, the user-visible Asterisk release process will not change.  All release tarballs, signatures, patches and change logs will continue to be available at https://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/.   The releases will also be available via GitHub at https://github.com/asterisk/asterisk/releases.  Specific artifacts can be retrieved with URLs like https://github.com/asterisk/asterisk/releases/download/<version>/asterisk-<version>.tar.gz.  You are encouraged to use the GitHub links to benefit from their CDN.

New Change Log Artifacts

• The CHANGES and ChangeLog files that used to appear in the top level distribution directory are no longer produced.
• The UPGRADE.txt file that appears in the top level distribution directory is no longer updated and will be removed in a future release.
• A new ChangeLogs directory now appears in the top level distribution directory.  It contains a separate ChangeLog file for each release, for example ChangeLogs/ChangeLog-20.3.0-rc1.md.
• The new ChangeLog files will contain notes that would formerly be added to the UPGRADE.txt file.
• A symbolic link in the top level distribution directory named CHANGES.md will point to the specific ChangeLog for the release.

New ChangeLog and Release Announcement Format

The release change logs and release announcements will have a new format.  Here's a sample:

To keep the Release Announcements posted to the mailing lists and community forums brief, they won't contain the detail commit section.

Branching Changes

In the past, a new branch was created for each minor release, for example 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, etc.  These branches were fairly useless once a release was cut because the only contained the tags for the current release and didn't really show the true release commit history.  Instead we now have a "release" branch for each major release, like releases/20 which will have the full-tagged commit history for the major release back to the date to the migration to GitHub (2023-04-29).  The commit history itself will go back to the start of time of course, it's just the tags that will go back as far as them migration date.