[openssl-project] 1.1.1 Release timetable

[Matt Caswell]

On 22/12/17 17:52, Salz, Rich wrote:
> I would like to make Alpha 1 be early January, and Beta 1 by
> mid-February.  That makes the release in mid-March.  That assumes the
> IETF hands the TLS 1.3 spec to the IESG for final review in
> February.

I think compressing the release cadence to less than 4 weeks (which is
implied by your suggestion) is overly ambitious and could be setting
ourselves up to fail. If you want to bring the final release date
earlier then one possibility is to drop the second alpha release, so the
timetable becomes:

23rd January 2018, alpha release 1 (pre1)
	OpenSSL_1_1_1-stable created (feature freeze)
	master becomes basis for 1.1.2 or 1.2.0 (TBD)
20th February 2018, beta release 1 (pre2)
20th March 2018, 1.1.1 public release (assuming TLSv1.3 RFC is published)

Doing it that way still gives us the best part of 2 months to work on
the release criteria (i.e. closing off old issues). Another option is to
relax the release criteria, so we need less time to work on them.

The problems with this approach are:
- we would now only be doing 2 pre-releases. Is that enough for things
to settle down and for us to be confident we have sufficient feedback?
- Feature freeze becomes 23rd January which gives us very little time to
get the final features in (although having said that the only real MUST
haves are the QUIC stuff, i.e. stateless stuff and early exporter support)

When do you realistically expect the final RFC publication to be? Given
past performance I am not hopeful of seeing it in Q1.

I would prefer to take our time a little more and see a release that we
are confident in, rather than one we have rushed out. Even if that means
the release doesn't go out until a month after TLSv1.3 RFC is published.

Matt