[openssl-project] Release strategy updates & other policies

Tim Hudson tjh at cryptsoft.com
Tue Sep 25 08:39:43 UTC 2018


A fairly common approach that is used is that you can only remove something
that has been marked for deprecation at a MAJOR release version boundary.

That is entirely independent of the semantic versioning view of things -
which also happens to say the same thing (that adding a deprecation
indication is at least a MINOR release and the removal is at a MAJOR
release).
PATCH versions should never change an API.
So we start warning whenever it is that we decide to deprecate in a MINOR
release, but any actual removal (actual non-backwards compatible API
change) doesn't come in place until a MAJOR release.

I see marking things for deprecation is a warning of a pending
non-backwards-compatible API change - i.e. that there is another way to
handle the functionality which is preferred which you should have switched
across to - but for now we are warning you as the final step before
removing an API at the next MAJOR release. We haven't committed we will
actually remove it - but we have warned you that we *expect* to remove it.

Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mta.openssl.org/pipermail/openssl-project/attachments/20180925/0ef585ee/attachment.html>


More information about the openssl-project mailing list