Open Stack

Thanks Jay & Jeremy for all the answers you gave to Scott. Let me also emphasize (with my stable maintainer hat on 🙂) that Train is *not* End of Life yet [1], but some of the projects decided to remove some of their stable/train (and even newer) branches due to lack of maintainers and broken gates and to free up resources.

(Note that, for example core projects have EOL'd their stable/rocky branches for quite a while now, and Rocky is about to EOL as a whole. Stein is in the very same situation (broken gates, long gone core components, etc.) and it is inevitable that Train will reach that point, too.)

Nevertheless, we also discussed recently that perhaps it would be beneficial to keep old branches open instead of deleting them, but for different reasons teams were not favor of doing that. Jay had a very good point in his previous mail as an example why it is better to delete old branches.

[1] https://releases.openstack.org/

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

________________________________
From: Jay Faulkner <jay at gr-oss.io>
Sent: Friday, May 12, 2023 4:50 PM
To: Scott Little <scott.little at windriver.com>
Cc: openstack-discuss at lists.openstack.org <openstack-discuss at lists.openstack.org>
Subject: Re: Train EOL

Scott,

I acknowledge and empathize with the pain -- I've operated OpenStack forks downstream at previous jobs and have had to push changes to swap from the branch to the EOL-tag. With that being said, I still wouldn't be in favor of that kind of change in policy, because the downsides -- such as it not being clear to contributors what branches were open for contribution -- are pretty high.

We have an announcement list[1]. I don't think it's a bad idea to start publishing posts there when a branch changes support status. I'm curious what other contributors would think of this.

Thanks,
Jay Faulkner
Ironic PTL
TC Vice-Chair

1: https://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-announce/

On Fri, May 12, 2023 at 6:32 AM Scott Little <scott.little at windriver.com<mailto:scott.little at windriver.com>> wrote:

Thanks for your response Jay

Yes the <branch>-eol tag is somewhat useful, but it doesn't appear to be created until the branch is removed.  There is no way for a downstream consumer to to prepare for the forthcoming branch deletion.  There is no way to avoid a period of breakage.

I'd like to suggest the branches be 'frozen', as in accepting no further updates, and tagged with <branch>-eol, but otherwise allowed to continue to exist for several months if not a year. That would allow downstream projects a reasonable period to switch from branch to tag and avoid a period of breakage.

Second point.  Is there a separate mailing list to announce major events such as EOL of a branch?  It's hard to pick such announcements out of a general mailing list.

Scott



On 2023-05-11 18:39, Jay Faulkner wrote:
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Hey Scott,

Good news! It's all still there, just not as branches. When a branch is moved from "Extended Maintenance" (EM) to End of Life (EOL), we remove the branch but retain the git refs on a tag.[1] (e.g. https://opendev.org/openstack/ironic/src/tag/stein-eol<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://opendev.org/openstack/ironic/src/tag/stein-eol__;!!AjveYdw8EvQ!apBHo-KzBygqt5lBcWQglBwJIGOdfH3sz3CcLWJ28X_9PFacGxLhRQnyyxD8ARoFb-md29v17QlQmDvFpQ$> is the tag representing Ironic stable/stein at the point of EOL).

Look for the `train-eol` tag on the projects you're struggling with, and that should be the git ref you're looking for. Hopefully your tooling is happy getting any git ref and not just a branch ref.

1: https://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html#end-of-life<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://docs.openstack.org/project-team-guide/stable-branches.html*end-of-life__;Iw!!AjveYdw8EvQ!apBHo-KzBygqt5lBcWQglBwJIGOdfH3sz3CcLWJ28X_9PFacGxLhRQnyyxD8ARoFb-md29v17QlQZtReEw$>

Thanks,
Jay Faulkner
Ironic PTL
TC Vice-Chair


On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 3:20 PM Scott Little <scott.little at windriver.com<mailto:scott.little at windriver.com>> wrote:
Hello OpenStack community

I'm one of the members of the StarlingX community.  We've had a lot of
stability issues with our ability to compile both our development branch
and supported release branches these last few weeks.  It all traces back
to the Train EOL. We weren't monitoring openstack mailing lists, and
missed the EOL announcement.  We are actively moving off of Train, but
aren't yet ready.

What's really causing us grief is that some sub-projects, e.g.heat and
nova, have started deleting elements of Train, e.g. git branches.

Now please don't take this wrong.  Ending support for an old branch is a
totally normal thing, and we accept that.  If StarlingX customers need
support in that area, we'll provide it. However I would plea to you to
NOT delete the elements of Train that allow other projects to compile
old openstack releases, e.g. your gits branches.

Sincerely

Scott Little on behalf of StarlingX


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