Moving Asterisk into main

[Joe Terranova]

I want to make it easier to install Asterisk on Ubuntu Server.

Asterisk is, according to Wikipedia, "a software implementation of a
telephone private branch exchange (PBX) originally created in 1999 by
Mark Spencer of Digium. Like any PBX, it allows attached telephones to
make calls to one another, and to connect to other telephone services
including the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Voice over
Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. Its name comes from the asterisk
symbol, '*'." [1]

You can use Asterisk to set up an extremely robust phone system which
can easily the replace proprietary PBXs -- for example, Cisco -- that
run most companies' phone systems. Trixbox and AsteriskNow are two
Linux distros, among several, that exist solely to make it easy to set
up and use Asterisk.

However, I want to make it easier for people to run Asterisk on Ubuntu
server; Ubuntu is my preferred distribution, and like many
administrators, I  would rather use a general purpose server
distribution than a specialized distribution. I currently run Asterisk
on Ubuntu server both for my company's and my home phone systems, but
one issue that keeps companies from using Asterisk on Ubuntu is the
security risk: Asterisk isn't kept up-to-date with security fixes
because it isn't in the main repository.

In order to fix security vulnerabilities, I must build Asterisk from
source, and I have to recommend the same thing for those using Debian
or Ubuntu to run their Asterisk server. This is makes administering
Asterisk on Ubuntu difficult.

Do developers see any issues with moving Asterisk to the main
repository? The stable release, 1.4, is only updated for bug fixes and
security issues; maintaining Asterisk seems to be rather easy -- it
just needs to get done, regularly.

I am, of course, happy to help in any way I can.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk_(PBX)

Sincerely,

Joe Terranova