---- On Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:05:04 -0700 Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org> wrote ---
Hi,
It's our policy that we maintain only a few branches, currently, from Caracal to Epoxy (so, 3 stable branches).
Currently, when a Stable branch becomes unsuported, we rename that branch as:
unmaintained/2023.1
which is fine, as we can still commit there. Though after some times, the branches are deleted, and instead, we just do a tag such as:
zed-EOL
Jeremy Stanley just wrote to me on IRC:
"workflows, processes and policies are built around many years of an assumption that unused branches will be deleted"
Keeping unmaintained branches "has put a lot of additional strain on project maintainers and our systems" (still quoting Jeremy).
Though each time there's a new (grave?) security problem, this topic comes back, as we still have no solution for these cases. As a downstream, I still need to write backports for these important patches, sometimes long after the branches are EOL. Red Hat too...
While I agree with all what Jeremy told me on IRC, and I don't think we should attempt to maintain the CI for too long (as this takes too much of our time), I still believe we should keep a way to share patches. Downstream (like myself for Debian) run their own CI based on packages, and it's always better if we can share patches. It doesn't have to be with a maintained CI. Just having opened branches would be enough.
I am so against keeping unmaintained branches for a long time, and even our policy allows that. It needs to be explicitly opt-in by the unmaintained team maintainers, and as you might know, project upstream teams (maintaining master and supported stable branches) are not responsible for maintaining or opt-in the unmaintained branches. For the CI scope, I am very against keeping anything with testing running. It does not make sense to me to have any branch without testing, and we keep backport the changes which can cause a lot of regression. For unmaintained branches, our policy is to at least keep one tempest job testing the overall stack, I do not think that is much work to keep it green if unmaintained branch is really maintained and has volunteers. -gmaan
Your thoughts?
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)