Hi, A note on Bifrost inline. On 11/12/24 7:35 PM, Elõd Illés wrote:

Hi,

(this time to the mailing list as well o:)) Thanks for your mail Jay! Let me try to comment on some things as stable maintainer & "unmaintainer" o:)

- bifrost: as you described, it's more like a deployment tool that is very dependent on the **recent** versions of things if i understand correctly. I trust Ironic team's judgement that it is somewhat impossible to maintain, though i don't have knowledge on bifrost, so i don't know how operators are impacted if we move bifrost to EOL as soon as a branch would transition to Unmaintained.

Bifrost usage indeed tends to lean towards recent versions, but that's not the key issue here. Being a deployment tool, it's highly sensitive to changes in the underlying operating systems (which are particularly frequent on CentOS Stream but also happen in Ubuntu). And while a service project like Ironic won't bitrot quickly even after its devstack-based CI no longer works, Bifrost should be considered broken once the CI is broken because the CI does exactly what operators do. And it only takes one unfortunate update. As a result, even maintaining stable branches is somewhat of an uphill battle. I cannot expect unmaintained branches to be useful. Dmitry

- victoria branch: note that 'unmaintained' was introduced exactly for the reason to take off the burden of project teams to maintain old branches (though every review on unmaintained branches are welcome o:)) or to feel the pressure that they need to maintain these old things. So unmaintained branches exist exactly for the reason to give chance to operators / vendors / etc to help each other with doing some maintenance, keep the possibility to land bug fixes, BUT don't promise falsely that those old branches are maintained. It's a best effort, if there are anyone who fixes the gate and reviews patches - not needed to be part of the given project team at all - then the branch is there to co-operate.

Thanks, Előd Illés irc: elodilles @ #openstack-release / #openstack-stable / #openstack-unmaintained

________________________________________ From: Jay Faulkner <jay@gr-oss.io> Sent: Monday, November 4, 2024 23:58 To: OpenStack Discuss Subject: [ironic] [unmaintained] Retire Bifrost UM? Retire Victoria?

Hi all,

At the PTG, Ironic cores discussed the state of unmaintained branches in Ironic, this email serves as documentation of this conversation as well as a call to action for anyone who uses (some) unmaintained projects.

During this discussion, it was very clear that we believe two things are ready for being fully end-of-life'd:

- Bifrost; all unmaintained branches. Bifrost is more of a deployment utility than a service; it takes considerable effort to keep it working past the normal maintenance period. It's the consensus of Ironic cores that all current unmaintained branches for bifrost should be closed, and we should avoid opening them in the future.

- Victoria: all projects. There are no longer Ironic core reviewers with vested interest in keeping victoria releases of Ironic (and related projects under BM governance) around anymore. This decision is also informed by the significant effort required to get patches tested against victoria during the recent Ironic OSSAs/CVEs. Since traditionally we have handled our own unmaintained branches, we're making a call for anyone who'd like to keep this alive -- including the current unmaintenance team.

This is awkward, because if these were branches Ironic fully controlled we would simply end-of-life them. However, since the idea is for these branches to be able to be maintained without the core teams' interaction, we were going to make this call out. If you have interest in keeping maintenance for these branches, please let us know -- otherwise we will begin efforts to end of life them.

Thanks,

Jay Faulkner