Thanks for your response Jay

Yes the <branch>-eol tag is somewhat useful, but it doesn't appear to be created until the branch is removed.  There is no way for a downstream consumer to to prepare for the forthcoming branch deletion.  There is no way to avoid a period of breakage.

I'd like to suggest the branches be 'frozen', as in accepting no further updates, and tagged with <branch>-eol, but otherwise allowed to continue to exist for several months if not a year. That would allow downstream projects a reasonable period to switch from branch to tag and avoid a period of breakage.

Second point.  Is there a separate mailing list to announce major events such as EOL of a branch?  It's hard to pick such announcements out of a general mailing list. 

Scott

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Hey Scott,

Good news! It's all still there, just not as branches. When a branch is moved from "Extended Maintenance" (EM) to End of Life (EOL), we remove the branch but retain the git refs on a tag.[1] (e.g. https://opendev.org/openstack/ironic/src/tag/stein-eol is the tag representing Ironic stable/stein at the point of EOL).

Look for the `train-eol` tag on the projects you're struggling with, and that should be the git ref you're looking for. Hopefully your tooling is happy getting any git ref and not just a branch ref.

1: https://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html#end-of-life

Thanks,

Jay Faulkner

Ironic PTL

TC Vice-Chair

On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 3:20 PM Scott Little <scott.little@windriver.com> wrote:

Hello OpenStack community

I'm one of the members of the StarlingX community.  We've had a lot of
stability issues with our ability to compile both our development branch
and supported release branches these last few weeks.  It all traces back
to the Train EOL. We weren't monitoring openstack mailing lists, and
missed the EOL announcement.  We are actively moving off of Train, but
aren't yet ready.

What's really causing us grief is that some sub-projects, e.g.heat and
nova, have started deleting elements of Train, e.g. git branches.

Now please don't take this wrong.  Ending support for an old branch is a
totally normal thing, and we accept that.  If StarlingX customers need
support in that area, we'll provide it. However I would plea to you to
NOT delete the elements of Train that allow other projects to compile
old openstack releases, e.g. your gits branches.

Sincerely

Scott Little on behalf of StarlingX