BTW it could be a good time to include the latest OpenSSL patches (to protect against the 0-day heartbleed bug).
Ha! So it means shifting towards bitcoin-0.9.1 codebase. Its a serious piece of a project, I am waiting for answer from primecoin developers if they are planning to go this way, before I will get into it.
No, you can include the latest OpenSSL patches while staying on the same codebase. OpenSSL is a separate library.