Open Stack

On Thu, Aug 24, 2023, at 7:27 AM, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> On 8/23/23 22:21, Jay Faulkner wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> Ironic is one of the major offenders remaining in the work to cleanup 
>> Zuul config errors. To resolve these issues, it's my plan to retire any 
>> impacted branches unless a contributor volunteers to clean them up. I 
>> will give folks until at least September 1, 2023, to object before I 
>> begin to take action.
>
> In fact, this makes me question how it works in OpenStack in general. It 
> feels like many projects are doing their ways, and deprecating old 
> branches in different ways. Sometimes, this happens when a CVE can't be 
> addressed in a proper way.
>
> So I wonder: what's the promised lifecycle of a release, and why this is 
> different depending on the project? Aren't we committed to maintain at 
> last the latest 3 releases? If so, then deprecating any branch before 
> Yoga is currently fine, no? If so, why are projects keeping stable 
> branches opened for longer?

The reason for branches sticking around is the "Extended Maintenance" phase. The idea was to keep branches open for community members to collaborate on backports beyond the regular maintenance period. I think projects have found that downstreams largely haven't participated and the projects do the work themselves. This is why you are seeing cleanups.

More details on the stable branch lifecycle can be found here: https://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html#maintenance-phases

>
> Cheers,
>
> Thomas Goirand (zigo)