[FEEDBACK REQUESTED] When should we lift the milestone restriction on kubernetes/kubernetes?

[Stephen Augustus]

Hi fellow leads!

As you may know, towards the end of the Kubernetes 1.19 release cycle, we put forth a proposal and imposed a milestone restriction on merges to the `master` branch unless they were targeted for the 1.20 milestone.

This restriction allowed us to better control merges and give some sorely-needed attention to bugs, failing tests, and the underlying CI infrastructure.

I've been sending periodic updates on our phased reopen for 1.20 development.
At this point, all of the pressing work we had planned on doing is complete.

So the next question is, "When do we remove the milestone restriction and get back to 'business-as-usual'?".

To paraphrase some things I mentioned in last week Thursday's Leads meeting...

I'm in favor of leaving the milestone restriction in place for the entire cycle.

I think there's a reasonable about of late-cycle work that is handled by the Release Team to determine whether or not something needs to be in-milestone, and this would assist in alleviating some of that as we move into the holidays later in the year.

From a SIG/component-level perspective, this will of course carry some additional burden on existing milestone maintainers.
At the same time, I think this is a reasonable burden, given the expectations of a milestone maintainer.

Some of this can burden can be mitigated by scaling up your area's milestone maintainers and having discussions about how triage is done in your SIGs.

Of course, this is a decision we should all make together and I'd like to solicit feedback here.

Can we set a clock to make a call on this by Friday, September 18, EOD US Eastern?

-- Stephen