[OTC VOTE PROPOSAL] Fixing missing failure exit status is a bug fix

Nicola Tuveri nic.tuv at gmail.com
Tue Nov 24 11:51:44 UTC 2020


Background
----------

This follows up on a [previous proposal] that was abandoned in favor of
an OMC vote on the behavior change introduced in [PR#13359].
Within today's OTC meeting this was further discussed with the attending
members that also sit in the OMC.

The suggestion was to improve the separation of the OTC and OMC domains
here, by having a more generic OTC vote to qualify as bug fixes the
changes to let any OpenSSL app return an (early) failure exit status
when a called function fails.

The idea is that, if we agree on this technical definition, then no OMC
vote to allow a behavior change in the apps would be required in
general, unless, on a case-by-case basis, the "OMC hold" process is
invoked for whatever reason on the specific bug fix, triggering the
usual OMC decision process.

Proposed vote text
------------------

        In the context of the OpenSSL apps, we qualify as bug fixes the
        changes to return a failure exit status when a called function
        fails unrecoverably.
        Even when these bug fixes change the apps behavior triggering
        early exits (compared to previous versions of the apps), as bug
        fixes, they do not qualify as behavior changes that require an
        explicit OMC approval.


[previous proposal]:
https://www.mail-archive.com/openssl-project@openssl.org/msg02241.html
[PR#13359]: https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/13359


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