Open Stack

>> I think "currently active stable branches" is key there. These branches
>> would no longer be "currently active". They would get an EOL tag when it
>> reaches the end of the support phases. We just wouldn't delete the
>> branch.
> This argument comes up at least once a cycle and there is a reason we don't do
> this. When we EOL a branch all of the infrastructure for running any ci against
> it goes away. This means devstack support, job definitions, tempest skip checks,
> etc. Leaving the branch around advertises that you can still submit patches to
> it which you can't anymore. As a community we've very clearly said that we don't
> land any code without ensuring it passes tests first, and we do not maintain any
> of the infrastructure for doing that after an EOL.

And it's this exact policy that has lead us to this mess we are in 
today.   As a vendor that has customers that use OpenStack, we have to 
support very old releases.  Customers in the wild do not like to upgrade 
once they get OpenStack up and running because it's very difficult, time 
consuming and dangerous to do.  We have customers still running Icehouse 
and they will most likely won't upgrade any time soon.  Banks hate 
upgrading software after they have customers running on it.   This is a 
community wide problem that needs to be addressed.

Because of this problem, (not being able to backport bug fixes in our 
drivers), we have been left with forking Cinder on our own github to put 
our driver fixes there.   This is a terrible practice for the OpenStack 
community in general, and terrible for customers/users of OpenStack, as 
we have N driver vendors that have N different mechanisms for getting 
bug fixes to their customers.  I believe this is a major problem for 
users of OpenStack and it needs to be addressed.
At the Cinder midcycle, we came up with a solution that would satisfy 
Cinder customers, as Sean planned out.  We acknowledge that it's a 
driver maintainer's responsibility to make sure they test any changes 
that get into the stable branches, because there is no infra support for 
running CI against the patches of old stable branches. I think that risk 
is far better than the existing reality of N cinder forks floating 
around github.   It's just no way to ship software to actual customers.

$0.02,
Walt