Comment 6 for bug 1596405

gutschke said "As is, Asterisk is completely broken in Xenial". If this is true for all users of Xenial, in that no single Xenial user is successfully using current Asterisk packaging, then SRU policy tends to be fairly lax since there cannot be any risk to existing Asterisk users. So if this can be demonstrated, then the SRU team may be willing to accept an update to a newer version, such as an upstream LTS branch.

On the other hand, if there are Xenial users on Asterisk (for example if they applied a workaround), then we have to consider them and not regress them by bumping up major versions.

This consideration doesn't apply to the backports pocket. Users have to opt-in to receiving a package update from backports, as opposed to SRUs which are recommended to all users automatically.

In terms of required version bumps to dependencies, as Christian says if the packages exist solely for Asterisk then I think the SRU team will consider bumping them at the same time if bumping the version of Asterisk that requires them is acceptable. Another thing to consider is if users have any reason to use those dependencies outside Asterisk packaging (or for example if they are using those dependencies to build Asterisk from source locally). We don't want to break those users in an SRU either, but again a bump in backports is generally OK.

Making any update here will need someone committed to preparing one and taking care not to regress existing Ubuntu users by following our policies diligently. I welcome you to take this on though - it'd be great for the community to have this fixed.