Hello Stackers, I'm sure you saw Elod's email eariler this week [0] calling for final releases from stable/yoga in preparation for its transition to 'Unmaintained' status. In addition to stable/yoga, the TC resolution [1] specified that the three most recent Extended Maintenance branches would also transition to 'Unmaintained', and branches older than that can be deleted. The TC and the release team have had some discussions over the past two weeks [2,3,4,5], and we are closing in on a consensus on how the proposal described in the 2023-07024 resolution should work. This is how it's looking: (1) branches ineligible for Unmaintained status These are stable/ussuri and stable/train. The release team will use the current tooling to generate the patches proposing the ussuri-eol and train-eol tags; teams will have a grace period to get any final changes merged; after the -eol tags are made, the branches will be deleted. (2) transitioning a branch out of Maintained status This is stable/yoga. Elod has already sent the reminder email [0] for project teams to propose a release patch if there's a reason to do a final release. The release team is working on tooling that will mark the HEAD of stable/yoga with yoga-eom (for "end of maintenance"), delete the stable/yoga branch, and then cut the unmaintained/yoga branch based on the yoga-eom tag. There will be a grace period for the community to decide whether the branch should be kept in Unmaintained status or deleted, as described in [1]. Eventually (either when the grace period expires, or later, when there is no longer interest in keeping unmaintained/yoga around), the HEAD will be tagged yoga-eol and the branch deleted. (3) transitioning current eligible Extended Maintenance branches to Unmaintained status These are stable/xena, stable/wallaby, and stable/victoria. Ericsson has expressed interest in keeping victoria in Unmaintained status. Subject to the guidelines in [1], wallaby, xena, and yoga will therefore be kept in Unmaintained status as well. Eventually, consistent with [1], these branches will be tagged $series-eol and deleted. For more details about (1)-(3) above, see the discussion in [6]. The current patch to the Project Team Guide [7] will be updated shortly to reflect the discussion in [6]. (4) amendment to the Unmaintained branch resolution The original plan in [1] was for there to be a $project-unmaintained-core Gerrit group for each OpenStack project that would have +2/+W powers on the unmaintained/$series branches. This would entail changes in the Gerrit ACL config files for all projects plus populating all the Gerrit groups. I've put up an amendment [8] to the resolution that would instead establish a single openstack-unmaintained-core Gerrit group that would have +2/+W powers over all the unmaintained/* branches in the openstack namespace. Projects that would prefer to stick with the original proposal and have tighter control over their unmaintained/* branches can still do so; they'll have to patch the appropriate Gerrit ACL config file(s) for their project and populate the $project-unmaintained-core group. Note that except for the Amendment mentioned in (4), this email only provides details about how [1] is to be implemented; it does not change the nature of the Unmaintained branch proposal that was adopted by the TC back in July 2023. If you have questions or comments, please reply to the openstack-discuss mailing list, or leave comments on [7] and [8]. [0] https://lists.openstack.org/archives/list/openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.... [1] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/resolutions/20230724-unmaintained-branch... [2] https://meetings.opendev.org/meetings/tc/2023/tc.2023-10-31-18.00.log.html#l... [3] https://meetings.opendev.org/meetings/tc/2023/tc.2023-11-07-18.00.log.html#l... video meeting recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6nSRhfV_M [4] https://meetings.opendev.org/meetings/releaseteam/2023/releaseteam.2023-11-1... [5] https://meetings.opendev.org/meetings/tc/2023/tc.2023-11-14-18.00.log.html#l... [6] https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/early-caracal-unmaintained-transition [7] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/project-team-guide/+/897505 [8] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/governance/+/900940