Deprecate whinlatter (Yocto 5.3) — EOL May 2026

[rpcme]

Summary

Yocto Project Whinlatter (5.3) reaches End of Life in May 2026. Per our operations plan, we will officially deprecate the whinlatter and whinlatter-next branches in June 2026 to allow one week post-EOL for final merging.

EOL Date (Yocto Project): May 2026
Official Deprecation Date (meta-aws): June 1, 2026
Archive Date: December 2026 (EOL + 6 months)

Deprecation Checklist

Pre-deprecation (May 2026)

• Create this tracking issue
• Continue weekly releases through end of May
• Final ff-merge of any pending whinlatter-next content
• Final release: whinlatter-2026.22.0 (week of May 25)

Deprecation (June 1, 2026)

• Remove whinlatter-next from auto-backport.yml target_branches
• Stop auto-recipe-update on whinlatter-next branch (remove schedule trigger from workflow on that branch)
• Remove whinlatter from weekly release workflow branch list
• Add deprecation notice to whinlatter branch README
• Remove whinlatter from build-test-all-branches.yml
• Update repository README supported branches table

Archive (December 2026)

• Create final annotated tag if any security fixes were applied post-deprecation
• Archive branches (read-only)
• Remove from all CI workflows

Context

• Follows same process as kirkstone deprecation (Deprecate kirkstone/kirkstone-next — Yocto 4.0 LTS EOL April 2026 #15552)
• Wrynose (Yocto 6.0 LTS) released April 2026 as replacement
• After deprecation, only master and scarthgap will receive weekly releases

References

• Yocto Project Releases: https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Releases
• Whinlatter 5.3.2 (final upstream point release): March 2026
• Operations plan: meta-aws-operations-plan.md