end-of-life announcements (was: Breaking changes)

[Werner Koch]

On Wed, 23 May 2018 13:56, dank at kegel.com said:

>> So when talking about EOL, gpg community should consider writing down a consistent EOL strategy, similar to those of Ubuntu, Linux kernel or others or something like I tried to argue for in the middle of https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2018-May/060539.html
>
> Yes, exactly!

We announce EOL early.  Check the AUTHOR file of each package.  For
example Libgcrypt 1.7:

  Library: Libgcrypt
  [...]
  End-of-life: 2019-06-30

That was set with the last release (1.7.9) on 2017-08-27.  Two years are
pretty long given that even the new branches are ABI and API compatible.

For GnuPG 2.2 the things are not that easy.  We knew that we would need
a longer transition period, thus despite that 2.1.0 would have been a
development version, we urged people to start using 2.1 asap.  This was
due to the fact that many distributions still used the legacy 1.4 and
not the stable 2.0.

> To be kind to enterprise customers, GnuPG could pick one of
> those two dates as the EOL for 1.4.  Matching 16.04's EOL

There is no EOL planned for 1.4 but 1.4 shall not be used except when
you need compatiblity for the broken PGP 2 or you have a very exotic and
ancient platform.  But in the latter case you have all kind of other
problems than to care about gpg versions.

> Also, gnupg.org should add a web page like
> https://www.gnupg.org/release-end-of-life

Good idea.  However, I think it is better to add it to the download
page.  Which I just did:

   Package    Branch  Birth       End-of-life  EOL 
  -------------------------------------------------
   GnuPG      1.0     1999-09-07  2002-09-07   yes 
              1.2     2002-09-21  2005-01-01   yes 
              1.4     2004-12-16  (1)              
              2.0     2006-11-11  2017-12-31   yes 
              2.2     2014-11-06  tba              
   Libgcrypt  1.5     2011-06-29  2016-12-31   yes 
              1.6     2013-12-16  2017-06-30   yes 
              1.7     2016-04-15  2019-06-30       
              1.8     2017-07-18  tba              

  tba: To be announced.
  (1): Legacy version; see remarks above.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner


-- 
#  Please read:  Daniel Ellsberg - The Doomsday Machine  #
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
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