Starting with Version 5.11, the OVAL Language will have a new versioning policy that will allow the OVAL Community to refine the OVAL Language and quickly get those changes into a new release for use within content and tools.
Over the years, the OVAL Language Versioning Policy treated the OVAL Language and all of its components as one unit with a single version number. This approach to versioning resulted in infrequent large releases that required longer slower release cycles and typically greater implementation costs for OVAL Language users. Often times the core models of the OVAL Language would remain largely unchanged from one release to the next, but due to the need to create and refine language extensions the core models had the appearance of changing due to the assignment of new version numbers to those models. This appearance of change to the core of the language created a perception of instability in the core models and acted as an impediment to the development of needed language extensions. Ultimately, this approach resulted in long release timelines with significant delays to add support for new and evolving platforms.
A new versioning policy was developed to address these issues and enable the OVAL Community to more rapidly adopt new capabilities. Under this new approach to versioning the core models of the OVAL Language (OVAL Common, OVAL Definitions, OVAL System Characteristics, OVAL Results, OVAL Directives, and OVAL Variables) and individual platform extension models (Android, Cisco, Linux, UNIX, Windows, etc.) would be versioned independently. The core models should remain relatively stable while the more dynamic platform extensions are free to evolve as needed.
It is expected that for higher level usages of OVAL (for example SCAP) a rolled up version of the various Core and Platform Extensions would be created to create a snapshot of OVAL for purposes of things like validation.
This new versioning policy went into effect on November 30, 2014 with the official release of Version 5.11 of the OVAL Language and with the approval of the OVAL Board.
Starting with the 5.11 release, the OVAL Language now uses the policy described here
The OVAL Language Versioning Policy used prior to OVAL 5.11 was archived on November 30, 2014, but, is available here for informational purposes.