[Vote ended on 2022-01-15] community.general and community.network: reduce maintenance for old stable branches

[felixfontein]

Summary

Right now, we've defined the following on maintaining old branches (ansible-collections/community.general#582 (comment)):

• Once a new major version is released, there will be no more minor releases for previous stable-x branches.
• From then on, only bugfixes are allowed for ~6 months (backporting to the current two major releases).
• After that, only major bugfixes security fixes are allowed for another ~12 months (backporting to the current three major releases).

This means that right now (c.g 4.1.0 has been released):

• main contains everything that will end up in c.g 5.x.y
• stable-4 is the stable branch for the current major release (minor releases are made from this);
• stable-3 is the stable branch for the previous major release (bugfix releases are made from this);
• stable-2 and stable-1 are the stable branches which only receive major bugfixes and security fixes.

So currently have have five active branches. (The nightly CI for stable-1 and stable-2 got downgraded to weekly CI, to avoid consuming too many CI resources. The other three active branches have nightly CI.)

I would suggest to change the formulation for for another ~12 months to for another ~6 months, which would mean that we only have four active branches (stable-1 would be EOL since 4.0.0 has been released, if that would already be the case). This means that once c.g 5.0.0 is released in upcoming spring, both stable-1 and stable-2 will be EOL; and once c.g 6.0.0 is released in next fall, stable-3 will be EOL; and so on.

Since release policy questions for community.general and community.network have been set by the community meeting, I think we should also discuss and vote on changes here.

Timeline:

1. Until December 18th: discuss this in this issue; if you want this proposal modified, this is the time to suggest modifications and comment on other suggestions for modifications.
2. Assuming there have been no major changes: From December 19th to January 15th: vote on this.

The voting period (four weeks) is very long - IMO it should be 1-2 weeks in general -, but since there are a lot of seasonal holidays/vacations coming up, I think it's better to have some more time to vote on this.

Additional Information

No response

[felixfontein]

CC @dericcrago

[Andersson007]

So, if i understand correctly, this proposal suggests supporting the current major version + 2 prior major versions.
If yes
+1

[jillr]

+1 to current major version and 2 prior major versions

[tadeboro]

I did a quick scan over the commit history of the older branches, and there is almost no activity that would be related to the content (most of the fixes are CI/CD fixes). So considering this, I think shortening the maintenance cycle to the proposed six months is perfectly fine.

+1

[gundalow]

I did a quick scan over the commit history of the older branches, and there is almost no activity that would be related to the content (most of the fixes are CI/CD fixes). So considering this, I think shortening the maintenance cycle to the proposed six months is perfectly fine.

@tadeboro Thank you for doing that check

+1 to current major version and 2 prior major versions

[dericcrago]

+1 from me

[briantist]

+1

[acozine]

+1

[maxamillion]

+1

[tadeboro]

Final count as of 2022-01-16T9:47Z:

+8 (6 from steering committee, 2 for community): Andersson007 (SC), jillr (SC), tadeboro (SC), gundalow (SC), dericcrago, briantist (SC), acozine (SC), maxamillion
-0

Steering committee members that did not vote: ssbarnea, jamescassell, cidrblock, thaumos, felixfontein.

The proposal to reduce the maintenance period of old stable branches for community.general and community.network and can be implemented once my vote count is confirmed by another committee member.

[felixfontein]

Looks like I indeed forgot to add my +1 here. I guess I didn't wanted to add it as the very first vote, and then forgot about it... :)

[felixfontein]

I can confirm @tadeboro's count: +6 from steering commitee, +2 from community, and no other votes.

[felixfontein]

Updated the Releasing, Versioning and Deprecation issue in community.general: ansible-collections/community.general#582 (comment) (incl. edit of the first post).

I'll create PRs to add changelog fragments informing about this once it is clear when the stable-5 branching will happen.

[felixfontein]

community.general 1.x.y and 2.x.y are now EOL.

[Andersson007]

community.network 1, 2, 3 are EOL, closing, thanks everyone!