OpenSSL Communities

November 12, 2025 F-TAC meeting minutes

JE Jon Ericson Tue 16 Dec 2025 7:08AM Public Seen by 10

Note: I must have missed publishing these minutes after the November meeting. My apologies.

Attendees:

  • Dmitry Belyavsky - Committers

  • Igor Ustinov - Individuals

  • Barry Fussell - Large Businesses

  • Aditya Koranga - Small Businesses

  • Matt Caswell

  • Tomas Mraz

  • Jon Ericson

Old business

  • Consider backporting PR 28838 to 3.6 (TAC)

    • We've got support from the distribution community to request it (5 yes, 1 abstain, 29 undecided) (Dmitry) https://openssl-communities.org/d/rhz6wAPO/feedback-on-handling-of-generated-files

    • In the community of individuals, I've received only one response (from Richard), and it was rather negative. (Igor)

    • Large businesses didn’t discuss backporting but was positive on the change itself. (Barry)

    • Given no objections, we should go through normal review process. (Matt)

  • Open Hours (Dmitry) (See F-BAC meeting minutes)

    • A potential problem is whether there is an audience these meeting. (Igor and Aditya)

    • Since this is an opt-in opportunity it might not happen or be the same people asking for a meeting. That’s ok since it doesn’t take up resources if the meetings don’t happen. (Matt)

    • Is this related to the SIG that Dimitry started recently? (Aditya)

      • Similar, but that’s a longer term thing and this idea could be one-off. (Matt)

  • Small Businesses Feedback on Code reformatting: https://openssl-communities.org/d/jOsaU8T4/feedback-request-openssl-source-code-reformat

    • Concern about multiple versions affected, how the Git history will look, not wanting to take all the WebKit style, have scripts to help fix outstanding PRs, need for communicating with PR authors, etc. But on the whole the idea is supported. (Aditya)

    • Pointer format has been resolved. The plan is to do the right alignment as people expect. (Matt)

    • Large business is very positive and reiterated the need for scripts to simplify the process. Concern about diminishing returns applying back in time to older versions. (Barry)

    • The benefit for maintainters is that it makes cherry-picking possible. (Matt)


New business

  • Update on the agreed way forward with respect to ENGINE removal in 4.0. (Matt)

    • Feature branch: feature/engineremoval

    • PR to implement ENGINE removal

    • Compile option to add ENGINE stubs that do nothing for applications that attempt to use ENGINEs if they are available. Even in this case the symbols will be removed from the library.

    • No ENGINE will be default so the OPENSSL_NO_ENGINE macro is define 

  • Representing OpenSSL with James at recent conferences including PKI PQC Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Govware event at Singapore and ACM CCS at Taiwan (Aditya)