Need

We are running behind on client releases by quite a margin. The latest Kubernetes client

Proposed Solution

Parallelly release Alphas of clients

• Create the release branches release-13.0, release-14.0, release-15.0 checking them out of current state of master branch where the client is snapshotted to Kubernetes 1.16.

Corresponding Kubernetes Releases

• Generate Alpha client in each of the branches changing the upstream version corresponding to each release.
• Release the Kubernetes Client Alpha version.
• Any bug fixes need to be merged to the release branch itself since the generated client on the master branch will be out of sync with the release branch.
• The Beta and Stable releases can be done as client on master branch catches up.

Changes to python-base can still be merged to master branch since they are supposed to be generic tooling and should ideally work wiith any Kubernetes version.

Problems

• The bug fixes have to be merged to the corresponding release branches.
• Masters snapshot would considerably be out of sync with the release branches. To mitigate this we can do the following:
  • Let's say Kubernetes Client 12.0.0 stable (based on Kubernetes 1.16) gets released.
  • After that we will snapshot the master branch based on Kubernetes 1.17. The client in master branch now will be in sync with the client generated in release-1.17.
  • As for bug fixes made to release-1.17 branch, we can cherry-pick them to master branch in order they were merged to the release branch.
  • This way gradually master branch would catch-up to the release branch.

Release Cadence

To catch up to the releases, we can set a release cadence until we catch up. For example, let's say every 2 weeks we will try to release a new client version until we catch up.

Proposed Timeline (if this proposal is accepted this week)

With the above schedule, we will catch up to the Kubernetes releases. The next Kubernetes version (1.20) will tentatively release on 8th December (The schedule is still being finalized.)

/assign