[openssl-project] Release strategy updates & other policies

[Tim Hudson]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 7:23 PM Richard Levitte <levitte at openssl.org> wrote:

> So what you suggest (and what I'm leaning toward) means that we will
> change our habits.
>

Adoption of semantic versioning will indeed require us to change our habits
in a number of areas - that is the point of having a single clear
definition of what our version numbers mean.

I also do think we need to document a few things like what we mean by bug
fix compared to a feature update as there are items which we could argue
could either be a PATCH or a MINOR update depending on how we describe such
things.
Getting those things documented so we can be consistent is a good thing
IMHO. The specifics of which we place in PATCH and which we place in MINOR
are less important than being consistent in handling the same item.

For example:
- adding an ASM implementation for performance reasons - is that PATCH or
MINOR
- changing an ASM implementation for performance release - is that PATCH or
MINOR
- adding an ASM implementation to get constant time behaviour - is that
PATCH or MINOR
- changing an ASM implementation for constant time behaviour - is that
PATCH or MINOR

For all four of the above examples the API is the same (assuming that the
low-level APIs are not actually exposed in the public interface for any of
these).
And deciding on those depends how you view performance - is it a bug that
something runs slower than it could - or is it a feature.

Good arguments can be made for always MINOR or for PATCH - but I think we
should have a clear view on how we will handle such things going forward
given the OMC members have differing views on the topic and we shouldn't
end up with different handling depending on which members in which timezone
are awake for a given pull request :-)

Tim.
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