Automatic Kubernetes release branch fast forward

[Sascha Grunert]

Hey folks,

One of our goals in the Release Engineering subproject of SIG Release
is making the cherry-pick experience to release branches easier and
more aligned to the overall release process. There have been
discussions about whether or not it is required to do cherry-picks to
new release branches during the cycle, justified by the fact that we
do not manually fast forward release branches any more since a couple
of releases.

Based on this discussion, we were working on the creation of an
automatic release branch fast forward periodic job in prow, which is
actually working since yesterday (in mocked mode):

https://testgrid.k8s.io/sig-release-releng-informing#git-repo-kubernetes-fast-forward
https://github.com/kubernetes/release/issues/2386

You can see from the latest runs that the job does nothing right now,
because we do not have a release-1.24 branch yet. If the branch gets
created, then the job will sync the release branch and master until we
cut the final tag v1.24.0.

The job does no actual modification to the k/k repository yet, since
we're running it still in mocked mode. Our plan is to graduate the job
to sig-release-releng-blocking with the beginning of the 1.25 release
cycle (mid April) by removing the mocked behavior.

This means for the current cycle: Please still cherry-pick your merged
master PRs into the upcoming release-1.24 branch (planned for April 5)
in the same way we did it in the last cycle.

As a next step we will take care of updating the developer
documentation to reflect the current state. Thank you all and have a
wonderful weekend!

All the best,
Sascha
- on behalf of SIG Release

[Davanum Srinivas]

Thanks a ton Sascha!

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[Adolfo García Veytia]

Outstanding Sascha, thank you for handling this all by yourself!

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Adolfo García Veytia

[Benjamin Elder]

Really glad to see this, thanks Sascha!

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[Carlos Tadeu Panato Jr]

Yayy way to go!! Thanks Sascha!!

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[Antonio Ojea]

:clap: :clap:

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[Sascha Grunert]

Hey folks,

Since we now have a release-1.24 branch, I'd like to note that we
still have to cherry-pick all merged PRs into the release branch until
v1.24.0 has been released.

The new testfreeze plugin will hint you towards that, for example like there:
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/109559#issuecomment-1103590927

The automatic fast-forward job will be monitored during the next weeks
and will go live after v1.24.0.

All the best,
Sascha

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/kubernetes.io/d/msgid/dev/CABhP%3Dtb%2BPrrvW5Ky9fU0bdiWL4vs%2BS2xrfYLQSrRrV5dBpqrow%40mail.gmail.com.

[Sascha Grunert]

Hey folks,

The automatic release branch fast forward job is now running in nomock
(live) mode as part of the upcoming v1.25 release cycle.

This means that no manual cherry-picks to release-1.25 are required
any more! \ö/

We also promoted the job to release-blocking:
https://testgrid.k8s.io/sig-release-releng-blocking#git-repo-kubernetes-fast-forward

Beside that, the prow testfreeze plugin will mention the new workflow
in a comment on every PR if we're in the testfreeze period (end of the
cycle):
https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra/pull/26190

As fancy as possible, the comment provided by the plugin will mention
when the most recent fast-forward from master to release-1.25 has been
done.

The docs have been updated as well:
https://github.com/kubernetes/sig-release/blob/master/releases/release_phases.md#test-freeze

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns, or
drop a note at the related issue:
https://github.com/kubernetes/release/issues/2386

All the best,
Sascha

[Sascha Grunert]

Hey folks,

There was an issue in the v1.26.0 release process, which was caused by
the decision to cut the patch releases in parallel to the official
one: The changelog modifications happening during the patch releases
push to the corresponding release-1.x as well as to the master branch.
This means that a possible fast-forward run (every 6h [0]) can
incorporate changes into the release-1.26 branch, which causes git
merge conflicts with the already staged sources.

To avoid all of that, we now pause the fast-forward if a corresponding
"Cut 1.x.0 release" [1] issue is open in kubernetes/sig-release [2].
This allows us to manually stop the fast-forward process and also
resume it in case anything went wrong. A documentation update is also
in progress [3].

Feel free to reach out anytime if we have missed anything here.
Otherwise have a wonderful Christmas everyone and enjoy the holidays!

All the best,
Sascha

[0]: https://testgrid.k8s.io/sig-release-releng-blocking#git-repo-kubernetes-fast-forward
[1]: https://github.com/kubernetes/sig-release/issues/2120
[2]: https://github.com/kubernetes/release/pull/2814,
https://github.com/kubernetes/release/issues/2807
[3]: https://github.com/kubernetes/sig-release/pull/2124