This is a discussion I've been meaning to start for a very, very long while. The tl;dr of it is that when official OpenStack projects have ceased to meet our expectations for what it means to be OpenStack, allowing them to continue on in an unofficial capacity but otherwise unchanged has led to confusion among users. Finding a better way to handle project removals is my goal for this conversation. Inevitably, there are times when projects cannot continue to be a part of OpenStack. Often this is because development has ceased, and so we can retire their repositories cleanly leaving a notice to any remaining users that the project is unmaintained. Sometimes a project is unable or unwilling to continue to be a part of OpenStack officially, and we have made the choice to simply remove them from our governance but otherwise wish them well on their new journey. Unfortunately, more often than not, a formerly official project continuing development outside OpenStack is an indication it's nearing the end of its life, soon thereafter ceasing development and leaving behind an abandoned repository where even the most critical bugs go untriaged and proposed fixes unreviewed. This is the case for a lot of software which has ceased viability, so unsurprising, but given it was once a part of OpenStack there are users who simply assume it's still maintained and so it reflects negatively on us when they end up having a bad experience. One possibility we've entertained, over the years this topic has cropped up, is to declare that projects in the infrastructure we share (soon to be known as OpenDev) which were once an official part of OpenStack retain some residual TC jurisdiction so that if we notice their maintainers have disappeared we can take over and close down the project more thoroughly. This may work well enough in situations where it's brought to our attention, but will clearly not help the first people to notice this situation nor does it help in cases where we're never informed. With the "namespace explosion" coming in OpenDev, however, there's another option open to us. We could require that any development which continues after removal from OpenStack be done as a fork of the original. In theory we could have done that even with one common namespace, by requiring projects to either cease using this infrastructure entirely or change their name. Neither of these options is especially desirable. Now, however, we might consider allowing them to continue in the same infrastructure under the same repository name but in a different namespace. We would effectively close down development on the original repository following our normal retirement process, but could optionally also include a note mentioning where continued development is known to be taking place instead. Does anyone have other ideas to suggest? -- Jeremy Stanley