On Fri, 2009-09-11 at 17:59 +0200, Dr. Stephen Henson wrote: > Under the new versioning scheme letter changes will retain binary > compatibility. They will be bugfix only and no new features will be added. > > There wont be a 0.9.9 to avoid confusion with what we used to call "0.9.9" > which is now 1.0.0. So after 0.9.8 there may be a 0.9.10. > > Changes to the last number i.e. 1.0.1 or 0.9.10 will retain backwards > compatibiity but new features can be added. > > The middle number as has been noted wont guarantee binary compatibility, > however source compatibility will be largely maintained though use of some > deprecated features may be phased out long term. We only make such releases > every few years.
I'm still trying to understand what this actually means in practice, and who the target audience is for the various branches. Presumably, most of the conservative OS distributions (Solaris, "Enterprise" Linux distros, various BSDs) will stick with 0.9.8 for the time being. Those who are more versatile will be updating to 1.0.x -- some of them like Fedora are there already, in fact. So is there really any point in a 0.9.10 release? Who would actually want to use that, and what would be in it? In the meantime, there are people who are trying to get features into the codebase that people actually use -- Intel's AES-NI support, IBM's AES-GCM/AES-CCM/CMAC, etc. The normal response from distributions is, quite reasonably, "get it into 0.9.8 upstream and then we'll talk". Which is obviously not such a realistic proposition any more -- so what happens next? -- dwmw2 ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org Development Mailing List openssl-dev@openssl.org Automated List Manager majord...@openssl.org
