[openssl-project] A proposal for an updated OpenSSL version scheme (v2)

[Tim Hudson]

On Sat, 22 Sep. 2018, 2:29 am Viktor Dukhovni, <openssl-users at dukhovni.org>
wrote:

>
>
> > On Sep 21, 2018, at 12:14 PM, Matt Caswell <matt at openssl.org> wrote:
> >
> > I support Richard's proposal with an epoch of 1.
> > Grudgingly I would accept an epoch in the 3-8 range.
> > I would oppose an epoch of 2.
>
> I can live with that, though it might mean that a minority of
> applications will interpret (based on obsolete nibble extraction)
>


It isn't obsolete nibble extraction - that is the documented way to get the
major version. In the header file and in the API docs. This is changing
things as we document the format of that number currently and some code
does use that.

What Richard proposes is a breaking change conceptually and it doesn't need
to be one.

We can get to semantic versioning and also not break existing documented
usage.

But what we will be doing is following a versioning scheme that states
precisely what it means for API changes.

It says nothing specifically about ABI changes unless you take the view
that ABI == API when reading the document too.

If that is the case then our current practice of allowing ABI breakage with
minor release changes (the middle number we document as the minor release
number) has to change.

And anyone depending on checking the minor version number for ABI
compatibility will break.

Tim.
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