Clarification of releases lifecycle and status of branches

[yurnov]

Dear maintainers,

Can we have a clear picture of what the current maintenance strategy is for releases?

I see that all content that is maintained by the Ansible Network team will drop support of ansible-core < 2.16.0 soon, which is a breaking change, and a new version 6.0.0 is planned (see ACA-2406). Based on the timeline for Ansible 12, it will be good to have it completed by 2025-06-16. Completion of #914 is required, at least from the testing perspective (that is done, as I assume, please find my comment in this issue).

At the same time, two branches are in active maintenance:

• stable-3 that is included to Ansible 10 (ansible-core 2.17)
• stable-5 that is included in Ansible 11 (ansible-core 2.18)

The collection version 4.0.0 wasn't included in any released version of the Ansible community package, and branch stable-4 is not maintained.

Ansible 9 (ansible-core 2.16) includes collection version 2.4.0-2.4.2.
Ansible 8 (ansible-core 2.15) includes collection version 2.x.y.

ansible-core 2.15 reached EOL and was excluded from the testing (please see ansible-network/github_actions/pull/171) and ansible-core 2.16 is close to EOL (latest critical fix was on May 2024, and latest security on Nov 2024), but ansible-core 2.17 will be supported till November 2025, so, it reasonable to keep stable-3 maintained till then. But I don't see a practical reason to drop back a new functionality (like #916) to 3.x.y release.

So, my proposal is:

• dropback all new functionality added to the main to the stable-5 branch;
• dropback only bugfixes to the stable-3 branch;
• Have somewhere documented the current status of branches and dropback policy, as well as the planned lifecycle for versions/branches.

[beeankha]

Hi @yurnov , thank you for inquiring about the collection maintenance strategy as well as those proposals that you listed. The maintenance team is currently working on standardizing how to manage ansible-core + Collection dependencies. After we finalize the content of that document, we will be merging it into the Cloud Content Handbook; you should find some relevant answers in that pull request to the questions that you posted above.