Hi team!

Some time ago we introduced bugfix/X.Y branches [1] to some of the Ironic projects. This has worked pretty well and has been very helpful in ironic/inspector/IPA, but I have second thoughts about Bifrost.

First, maintaining Bifrost branches is tedious enough because of how many distros we support and how quickly they change.

Second, our recommended approach to using Bifrost is to git-clone master and work from it. I'm honestly unsure if the regular stable branches are used (outside of the Kolla CI), let alone bugfix branches. (I also doubt that Bifrost releases are very popular or even meaningful, but that's another topic.)

As one of few people who is maintaining bugfix branches, I suggest we stop making them for Bifrost and switch Bifrost back to normal cycle-with-intermediaries. We can keep releasing 3x per cycle, just to have checkpoints, but only create "normal" stable branches.

Thoughts?

Dmitry

[1] https://specs.openstack.org/openstack/ironic-specs/specs/approved/new-release-model.html

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