[Proposal] Delete unmaintained release branches

[delvh]

Currently, there are way too many branches: There is main, and then there is release/v1.[8-15].
As far as I know, the latest still maintained branch is release/v1.14.
So, is there any reason to keep any release branch below release/v1.14?
Because as far as I can see, the only thing the current branching pattern achieves is making a branch switch more complicated/ time consuming.

Alternatively, it would also be possible to open a fork that simply keeps the release branches that are currently unmaintained, if these branches are still wanted, although I doubt that.

[zeripath]

Iirc there are unreleased commits on some of those branches but I guess we could just tag as eg v1.8.x-unreleased and then delete the branch.

[zeripath]

We also deleted a lot of old branches in the last release phase ...

Prior to 1.14 we still had all of the branches up to 1.7

[yardenshoham]

Let's do it

[lunny]

We can save the commit id in some code file and then delete these tags before 1.14.

[delvh]

Sidenote: At the time I opened this issue, 1.16 was the current main branch.
By now, it is basically 1.20.