Hello,
we don’t really formalize the “end of life” of the branches. Instead we formalize the supported branches in https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/VersioningAndReleasePractices#HReleaseCyclesandReleaseStrategy.
It means that, as of today, we support 3 branches:
- 16.10.x which became very recently the new LTS
- 17.0.x which will became the new stable branch
- master which is the branch we currently develop in
And by supported it means that we’re pushing bug fixes and security fixes in those branches.
Now for other branches it’s a bit a case by case basis: for example, we’re going to perform soon what we expect to be a latest release of 15.10.x before dropping it. It’s already officially not supported anymore but we have a few bug backported in it, so we release it before stopping the support.
For 14.10.x, what happened is that we’ve been requested by XWiki SAS to support it for longer than usual, so we agreed to keep backporting some bug fixes in it and to perform releases for it. Which explains why it kept having many releases.
Also note that the XWiki SAS employees do maintain a mid-year branch of XWiki, often named “recommended”, and that there’s a proposal to transform that as a mid-year LTS globally for the community, see: Switching to a LTS release every 6 months?
Hope it clarifies a bit the situation 