[jimnotgym]

Change control need not be onerous.

One important aspect of it is simply sharing that a change is going to be made. It stops a few of those 'if only you had told me first' conversations.

[humanrebar]

My point is actually that it's not possible to do that meaningfully past a certain (rather modest) level of complexity and reuse. How does a library like openssl meaningfully and thoroughly notify all it's downstream users in Debian, Node, Gentoo, etc. what changes to pay attention to?