There has been a deprecation announcement in The Bullhorn #123 for the openvswitch.openvswitch collection. It says there won’t be any more major releases, but I don’t see any minor or even bugfix release either for quite some time.
There is no information about deprecation neither in the repo nor on galaxy. However, I suggest to remove it ASAP. That is in the Ansible Community Package 11.
I have created a Removal from Ansible Community Package issue in the repository. It’s loosely based on the text that I use for the Identifying and removing an unmaintained collection process. But since they did announce the removal in The Bullhorn but nowhere else, this doesn’t really fit and I’ve improvised a bit.
Also, it looks like sanity tests are failing for stable-2.16+.
Hello,
I am new to this community, but as I go through this discussion I am curious about the openvswitch collection. Can you explain it in simple terms?
What, the collection? No, I don’t really know it 
From the name (and the desription you can find, for example, in the repository README) it’s about configuring Open vSwitch.
Or do you mean this discussion in general? Well, in simple terms: From time to time we have a look at the collections included in the Ansible Community Package (ACP) and ask ourselves if there are some that should be removed to keep it sane. And working on those that are possibly unmaintained is a good starting point.
This is just about removing a collection from ACP, nothing else. It will stay available on GitHub and Galaxy. If not, someone else will have removed it but not us.
Thank you for the explanation and informative links 
Hello @mariolenz! I’m from the Ansible Network team, that maintains the openvswitch.openvswitch collection. This collection was deprecated in December, 2023 and will reach end-of-life on December, 2025. During this period, we will only be doing patch releases for this collection if a critical bug or security vulnerability has been reported.
We will continue to run ansible-test in CI for ansible-core<=2.17, >=2.15 and as such compatibility with ansible-core versions >2.17 will not be guaranteed.
I have opened a PR that fixes the sanity failure with >=stable-2.16 and also an update to the README mentioning all the above. (Apologies to the Community for not doing that along with the Bullhorn announcement.)
Please let me know if the above points would qualify this collection to continue being included in the Ansible Community Package.
Thank you!
Thanks @nilashishc, this is a very important and valuable information!
This sounds like we shouldn’t remove the collection ASAP / from Ansible 11. But also that we might want to announce the deprecation / removal from a future version of the Ansible Community Package. If we keep releasing new Ansible versions as we did in the past, I think 13 would have an ETA of around November 2025 and would be a good time.
Compatibility with ansible-core>2.17 is not guaranteed looks problematic.
So for my understanding, this collection would need to be officially deprecated in… Ansible community package 11.0.0 release so it can be removed in 13?
We can also deprecate it now and remove it already from 11.0.0. Or from 12.0.0. Or from 13.0.0. Whatever we prefer (and decide on).
Let’s move the discussion to Several collections have been deprecated by the Ansible Network team.
Since this collection hasn’t been only deprecated, but it’s clear now that ansible-core 2.18 won’t be supported (see here and here) we have to remove it from the Ansible Community Package 11 because it will be based on this.
We’ve removed both frr.frr and openvswitch.openvswitch from the Ansible Community Package 11.
In case anyone wonders why we didn’t vote on this: We’ve talked about this in the community meeting and decided we don’t need one because of Removing a collection that has been explicitly deprecated or abandoned by its (former) maintainers.