Hi stable maintainers,

This mail is about to get some attention to build-openstack-sphinx-docs job that recently started to fail on old stable branches (Queens and Pike) and block gates for about ~30 repositories. (The failures are also visible in periodic stable jobs). This is because py27 support from sphinx jobs were removed [1] recently. (Python 3 (py35) support was mostly done in Rocky so that branch is not affected)

To unblock the gates I see the following options:

1. fix sphinx jobs to work with py35 (most probably requires some patches to backport - in a squashed patch - and maybe some resolution of requirement conflicts)

2. set sphinx jobs to non-voting (even better to remove them to do not use resources unnecessarily)

3. revert the patch [1] that removed the py2 support of sphinx (maybe the easiest thing to do, though i understand that py2 support is something that shouldn't be kept forever)

4. teams examine their old branches and if they are not really maintained, haven't merged patches recently, then probably it is a good time to propose their EOL transition according to the EOL process [1]

Some additional thoughts:
- When Extended Maintenance was introduced the community agreed that certain CI jobs can be removed, CI coverage can be reduced as time goes.
- To keep open an old branch in Extended Maintenance helps the cooperation between vendors / users as instead of maintaining it by themselves it can be done with a common effort, which could be beneficial for everyone. On the other hand, if there are no maintainers or invested efforts to keep the branch and CI alive, then it is a reasonable decision to transition the branch to End of Life.

Please consider the above options and act to eliminate the gate failures / periodic stable job failures.

[1] https://review.opendev.org/c/zuul/zuul-jobs/+/827588
[2] https://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html#end-of-life

Thanks,

Előd