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Hi everyone!

Yesterday on the Ironic midcycle we agreed that we would like to remove 
support for the old bash ramdisk from our code and gate. This, however, 
pose a problem, since we still support Kilo and Liberty. Meaning:

1. We can't remove gate jobs completely, as they still run on Kilo/Liberty.
2. Then we should continue to run our job on DIB, as DIB does not have 
stable branches.
3. Then we can't remove support from Ironic master as well, as it would 
break DIB job :(

I see the following options:

1. Wait for Kilo end-of-life (April?) before removing jobs and code. 
This means that the old ramdisk will essentially be supported in Mitaka, 
but we'll remove gating on stable/liberty and stable/mitaka very soon. 
Pros: it will happen soon. Cons: in theory we do support the old ramdisk 
on Liberty, so removing gates will end this support prematurely.

2. Wait for Liberty end-of-life. This means that the old ramdisk will 
essentially be supported in Mitaka and Newton. We should somehow 
communicate that it's not official and can be dropped at any moment 
during stable branches life time. Pros: we don't drop support of the 
bash ramdisk on any branch where we promised to support it. Cons: people 
might assume we still support the old ramdisk on Mitaka/Newton; it will 
also take a lot of time.

3. Do it now, recommend Kilo users to switch to IPA too. Pros: it 
happens now, no confusing around old ramdisk support in Mitaka and 
later. Cons: probably most Kilo users (us included) are using the bash 
ramdisk, meaning we can potentially break them when landing changes on 
stable/kilo.

4. Upper-cap DIB in stable/{kilo,liberty} to the current release, then 
remove gates from Ironic master and DIB, leaving them on Kilo and 
Liberty. Pros: we can remove old ramdisk support right now. Cons: DIB 
bug fixes won't affect kilo and liberty any more.

5. The same as #4, but only on Kilo.

As gate on stable/kilo is not working right now, and end-of-life is 
quickly approaching, I see number 3 as a pretty viable option anyway. We 
probably won't land any more changes on Kilo, so no use in keeping gates 
on it. Liberty is still a concern though, as the old ramdisk was only 
deprecated in Liberty.

What do you all think? Did I miss any options?

Cheers,
Dmitry