On 2021-01-27 12:06:41 +0100 (+0100), Előd Illés wrote:
When Extended Maintenance process was created, there was no clear decision whether EOL (and branch deletion) is needed afterwards or not. But one thing we saw is that if a branch was EOL'd and still open, then patches arrived, and even some got approved which caused errors + confusions. Also, if the branch is open and periodic jobs are not deleted, then those are still running day by day. In this case only the branch deletion is the solution (as clearly those branches cannot accept job fixing patches).
Though, you are right that if we don't even tag a branch with '$series-eol', then the above issue does not come. So theoretically we could forget about the 'eol' process, it would not cause any issue in my understanding. The periodic jobs needs to be deleted from .zuul.yaml of course, and maybe some other cleanup, otherwise it is possible. That's true. I can accept this, and this was my concept, too, in the beginning. [...]
Deleting the branch serves a couple of purposes for visibility: first, as noted, people will get an error when trying to push a change for them; but second, consumers of those branches will actually no longer be able to pull from them nor check them out, and will have to switch to checking out the -eol tag for them instead, which makes it very clear that we are no longer developing on them. -- Jeremy Stanley