Hi all,

As you probably already know from gmann's reporting, the TC recently
passed a resolution[1] regarding the release cadence. This, in response
to some discussion around moving to different release cycle lengths,
becomes mostly a change regarding our deprecation procedures, as well as
a call to support the ability to skip certain releases (designated
"tock" releases) while sticking on a yearly cycle (designated "tick"
releases).

In support of the goal of moving to this new cadence for the AA release
(i.e. the yet unnamed release to come after Zed), I have introduced[2] a
new grenade-skip-level job, which tests skipping "tock" releases and
going straight from one tick to the following. We intend this to be a
voting job in AA, making sure it works from Yoga->AA. Right now it tests
Wallaby->Yoga for informational purposes. We would recommend projects
enable that as voting, or define their own job to do similar testing as
soon as possible. Manila has already started[3] this. Note that existing
grenade testing between each adjacent release remains unchanged in this
scheme.

On the topic of deprecation, we moved the current definition of
deprecation procedures from the soon-to-be-removed tag definition to a
new document in project-team-guide[4]. This now describes the procedures
in terms of the tick-tock release arrangement, and is worth a read.

As the PTG is coming up, we will certainly discuss this topic in the PTL
Interaction[5] session. It would also be advisable to discuss the
project-specific details of this in the various project sessions. By
identifying this plan early and setting our goals for AA, we have a good
amount of time between now and then to get our heads wrapped around what
(if any) things we need to be doing. Luckily, the introduction of the
job to test this from wallaby to yoga required almost no project changes
to get working, which is a good indicator that it won't be too laborious
for most projects to adopt.

--Dan

1: https://governance.openstack.org/tc/resolutions/20220210-release-cadence-adjustment.html
2: https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/grenade/+/826101
3: https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/manila/+/830277
4: https://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/deprecation.html
5: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/tc-ptl-interaction-zed