Hey all,

I've been looking into the various zuul config errors showing up for Ironic-program branches. Almost all of our old bugfix branches are in the list. Additionally, not properly retiring the bugfix branches leads to an ever-growing list of branches which makes it a lot more difficult, for contributors and operators alike, to tell which ones are currently supported.

I've put together a document describing the situation as it is now, and my proposal:

Essentially, I think we need to:

- identify bugfix branches to cleanup (I've done this in the above etherpad, but some of the )

- clean them up (the next step)

- update Ironic policy to set a regular cadence for when to retire bugfix branches, and encode the process for doing so

This means there are two overall questions to answer in this email:

1) Mechanically, what's the process for doing this? I don't believe the existing release tooling will be useful for this, but I'm not 100% sure. I've pulled (in the above etherpad and a local spreadsheet) the last SHA for each branch; so we should be able to EOL these branches similarly to how we EOL stable branches; except manually instead of with tooling. Who is going to do this work? (I'd prefer releases team continue to hold the keys to do this; but I understand if you don't want to take on this manual work).

2) What's the pattern for Ironic to adopt regarding these branches? We just need to write down the expected lifecycle and enforce it -- so we prevent being this deep into "branch debt" in the future.

What do folks think?

-

Jay Faulkner