Enhancements Opt-in Process Change for v1.26
Author: Grace Nguyen
Context and Motivations
Since the inception of the Kubernetes release team, we have used a spreadsheet to keep track of enhancements for the release. The project has scaled massively in the past few years, with almost a hundred enhancements collected for the 1.24 release. This process has become error-prone and time consuming. A lot of manual work is required from the release team and the SIG leads to populate KEPs data in the sheet. We have received continuous feedback from our contributors to streamline the process.
Starting with the 1.26 release, we are replacing the enhancements tracking spreadsheet with an automated GitHub project board.
How does the Github Project Board work?
The board is populated with a script gathering all KEP issues in the kubernetes/enhancements repo that have the label lead-opted-in. The enhancements’ stage and SIG information will also be automatically pulled from the KEP issue.
After the KEP is populated on the Github Project Board, the Enhancements team will manually update the KEP with the label tracked/yes, tracked/no and on occasions, tracked/out-of-tree. The tracked label signifies qualification for the closest approaching milestone. For example, at the beginning of the release, tracked/yes means that the KEP has satisfied all Enhancements Freeze requirements and similarly for Code Freeze, tracked/yes means that all code related to the KEP has been merged. The tracked label is reserved for the Enhancements team use only.
What does this mean for the community?
If you are not a SIG lead, nothing will change beside the view of the enhancements collections and the change of platform. KEP authors will continue working with their respective SIG leads to opt in to the release.
For SIG leads, opting in is simple. The KEP issue will be the single source of truth so ensure that all metadata is up to date. Simply comment /label lead-opted-in on the enhancement tracking issue to opt it into the current release. That’s all you need to do to opt in! Since the script runs periodically, kindly come back to check that the KEP is on the board, labeled with tracked/yes, and that there is an Enhancements team member assigned to it.
We are excited to bring this highly requested feature into our release process and appreciate your patience. Email us at release-enhancements-team@kubernetes.io or find us on Slack at #release-enhancements if you have any feedback, questions or concern.