PRR Soft Freeze Today (and what that means)

[John Belamaric]

Hi folks,

It seems there is a little confusion about what PRR "soft freeze" means. It does NOT mean you have to have PRR approval today. It means that you have to be on the enhancements project board by today, and have your KEP ready for PRR (have answered the questions in the template to the best of your ability) by today, if you want to be *guaranteed* a review by the team. It's just a way for us to set expectations around PRR timelines.  

Early in the introduction of PRR we found that sometimes we had KEPs popping up at the last minute, expecting an immediate response. The problem is we are a small team and there are ~80 KEPs per cycle. So an "immediate response" wasn't always possible. (As an aside, we are *actively* working to grow the team, as you may have seen from our shadow process. So reach out on Slack if you are interested!)

The soft-freeze is our commitment to you: if you are ready for PRR by that date, you will get a review, and it will happen in time for you to respond (often there are a couple cycles of review and feedback).

If you are NOT ready for PRR for that date, we will still try hard to review and approve (if appropriate!) before enhancements freeze. But your KEP will be in line behind those who were more timely, and will be handled on a "best effort" basis.

I hope that clarifies the process and perhaps reduces some folks' blood pressure!

John

[John Belamaric]

A few additional points from feedback I just recieved:

1) By the "Project Board" I mean the enhancements tracking board that the enhancement team has built: https://bit.ly/k8s127-enhancements. See also https://www.kubernetes.dev/blog/2022/09/09/enhancements-opt-in/

2) How do I pick a PRR approver? You can pick any of us - we may reassign to load balance. But here are some guidelines to reduce the likelihood of us re-assigning (in order of descending priority):

 - If there was a PRR review for a previous stage, use the same approver.

 - If one PRR approver has been involved in the specific KEP as part of their role in a SIG, choose that one.

 - If one PRR approver is very involved in your SIG, choose that one.

 - Randomly choose one

3) Shadows will make the first pass review starting this cycle.

Please feel free to ask if you have any additional questions. We'll take the action to update the docs to make this clearer for future releases.

John