I have used Asterisk for some time and it’s quite good!!
I want to know, what’s the dieference between the “regular” releases of Asterisk and that of SVN.
Thanks!
SVN is a system for tracking source code being maintained by many developers. As the Asterisk devs make changes and improvements to *, they send their changes to SVN which integrates the changes into * itself. When you download from SVN, you are getting the absolute most current Asterisk. Thus, if you download from SVN today, and download again from SVN tomorrow, you will probably get something different tomorrow which will include new code that has just been written.
Every now and then, they will take the current SVN code, make sure it’s not totally broken and mark it as a release. That’s basically taking a current SVN, running it through some testing and packaging it up as a tar.gz file. Development then continues, SVN keeps changing, but that release will always be the same.
You would want SVN if you want to test the latest features, or you want to solve a bug that has been fixed recently and the fix hasn’t gotten into a release yet.
You would want a release if you want a known version of * that you can deploy with a slightly smaller worry about stability. Also, having a release is better for troubleshooting, as you can easily see who else (if anybody) using that same release has the same problem.