Open Stack

On 2017-01-18 15:19:36 -0800 (-0800), Eric K wrote:
> Hi all, Is there any community-wide policy on how long we strive
> to maintain compatibility with Ubuntu 14.04? For example by
> avoiding relying on MySQL 5.7 features. I've had a hard time
> finding it on openstack.org and ML discussions. Thanks lots!

Years ago the TC (only a few months after they ceased to be the PPB)
agreed to the following:

    OpenStack will target its development efforts to latest
    Ubuntu/Fedora, but will not introduce any changes that would
    make it impossible to run on the latest Ubuntu LTS or latest
    RHEL.

    http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2012-December/004052.html
    http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2013/tc.2013-01-08-20.02.log.html#l-7

You can also find it referenced in our requirements documentation:

    http://docs.openstack.org/developer/requirements/#finding-distro-status

The upshot has basically been that whatever the "latest Ubuntu LTS"
was at the time the development cycle began is what we use for the
purposes of testing development leading up to a given release, and
is subsequently maintained for testing the resulting stable branches
from that release until our support end-of-life is reached. However,
the Newton release ended in an unfortunate situation...

During the Newton development cycle, the Infra team decided to
provide teams a means of gracefully migrating their testing from
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS with the expectation that it would be
completed within one cycle. This did not happen in time for the
release, and so we wound up with some projects testing stable/newton
on 16.04 while others were testing on 14.04. Obviously we couldn't
leave things in that state indefinitely or it would risk breaking
some project dependencies entirely in that branch, so we pushed to
get any remaining teams to finish uplifting their stable/newton
testing to 16.04 soon thereafter.

The result is still that upstream OpenStack, from a QA/testing
perspective, considers stable/newton to "support" Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
("latest Ubuntu LTS" at the time its development cycle began), and
stable/mitaka is the last release we "supported" on Ubuntu 14.04
LTS. Hopefully that is the answer you're seeking?
-- 
Jeremy Stanley