Summing up the versioning discussion

[Cantor, Scott]

Just a sum up from the meeting, please speak up if you heard differently.

We should plan on making a decision imminently (certainly by immediately after 3.1) on how to handle API changes going forward and whether to stay with the "any addition is a minor" policy or make a change to that rule.

We also need to recommit to the assumption that we don't update third party dependencies outside of minor updates or patch releases. That's probably less controversial, I just want to make sure we're on board.

We seemed to agree that the preferred maven approach was to switch back to 3-digit snapshots, and to increase the patch number after any release. Any committer would be responsible for adjusting the snapshot if a commit means a minor or major change, and I would presume we would expect some discussion when that takes place. We would probably make this change after 3.1 is released.

Our policies dictate right now that a minor change to one of *our* dependencies would imply a minor change to all of the higher level dependencies (meaning java-support bumps spring-extensions and opensaml and spring-extensions bumps the IdP, etc.)

-- Scott

PS. For the record, I have a mild preference for a proposal to allow additions to public classes that are marked in some way as non-public to allow for interim patch releases.