Open Stack

Cinder currently has nine (9) branches open, which is a lot.  (See [0]
for a graphical representation.)  We'd like to close some.

In release chronological order, the eight stable branches are:

1. driverfixes/mitaka
2. driverfixes/newton

The above pre-date the OpenStack-wide extended maintenance phase [1] for
stable branches; they were created after mitaka and newton went EOL so
that there'd be a place where operators could get backported fixes for
Cinder drivers only.

3. stable/ocata
4. stable/pike
5. stable/queens

The above are currently in the extended maintenance phase.
Vulnerability Management is done on a reasonable effort basis only, and
there's no official statement of level of testing (could be extremely
limited). This phase also means that there are no longer any official
releases of these branches. So like driverfixes, any bug fixes merged
must be picked up and applied by someone downstream.

6. stable/rocky
7. stable/stein
8. stable/train

The above are in the 'maintained' phase [2] and not really the subject
of this email (they're just listed for completeness).

Ok, so here's what the Cinder team would like to know.

1. We're assuming that no one is using driverfixes/mitaka anymore and
would like to kill it.  Are we correct?

2. Is anyone still relying upon driverfixes/newton?  It contains 98
commits after the 9.1.4 tag (the final Cinder Newton release), so it's
been getting a lot of love from the team.  This is a key issue, because
if we keep this branch open, the OpenStack stable branch "appropriate
fixes" policy (point #4) implies that we must keep stable ocata, pike,
and queens open as well.

3. As far as the Extended Maintenance branches go, it seems that ocata
and pike could go EOL.  At the very least, we may need to reduce the
gate coverage on stable/ocata as there are rumors that it doesn't play
nice with Zuul v3.  Is anyone relying on stable/ocata or stable/pike ?


Thank you for your attention to this matter.  I should mention that the
Cinder team doesn't mind keeping branches open (as you can see by the
number of commits into driverfixes/newton), we just want to make sure
they're being used so we can allocate our resources efficiently.

It would be really helpful if you could respond before November 1 (that
is, before the end of this week) so we can make a decision at the PTG.


[0] https://launchpad.net/cinder/+series
[1]
https://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html#extended-maintenance
[2]
https://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html#maintained
[3]
https://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html#appropriate-fixes