[EXTERNAL] Re: Engine support timetable

[Tomas Mraz]

On Mon, 2023-11-20 at 08:14 +0000, Martin Bonner wrote:
> > There is no date set for that yet. Not even roughly. The earliest
> > release where the engine API can be removed is 4.0 but there was no
> > decision on when that version is going to be released and it was
> > not
> > even decided which of the deprecated APIs are going to be removed
> > in
> > 4.0.
> 
> > The functions deprecated in 3.0 will remain supported in 3.0 until
> > 2026-09-07. If there is any further 3.x version designated as LTS,
> > it
> > will give the lifetime of these APIs at least further five years.
> > But
> > it wasn't decided yet whether there will be another 3.x version
> > designated as LTS.
> 
> Thanks.  That provides "rigidly defined areas of doubt and
> uncertainty".

Yep. I would like us to make our LTS plans a little bit more certain
than this. As we are going to do time based releases starting from 3.3
I think it will be actually possible to make the plans a little bit
more concrete also in regards to LTS.


> I have two observations:
> 
> 1.  Please ensure there is always an LTS release that is in support.
> (If necessary by extending support on the existing LTS.)

That is already ensured by our policy. We have to declare a new LTS
release every 4 years at the latest and each LTS is supported for 5
years.

> 2.  I would prefer to avoid declaring X.0 an LTS.  If there are
> problems with the API in X.0, a new API can be added in X.1, to
> resolve it.

3.0 as an LTS was kind of exception. Unfortunately we had to mark some
release as LTS according to our policy and the 3.1 release was not out
yet.

-- 
Tomáš Mráz, OpenSSL