1.20 Release Branch Cut

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Hello Istio Community,

We would like to inform you that on 10/18/2023 we cut the release branch for the 1.20 release.

We would also like to bring to your attention some information related to the release:

  1. No new feature requests will be accepted to the 1.20 branch. Any exceptions will require TOC approval.
  2. Bug fixes will be accepted to the 1.20 branch after being reviewed by the 1.20 release managers. To get changes into the 1.20 branch, they must be merged first to master then add the cherry-pick label for 1.20 to be automatically cherry-picked to the 1.20 release branch. If the automatic cherry -pick fails, you may have to manually cherry-pick the changes to the release-1.20 branch.
  3. Commits with no-risk of impacting stability during our tests will mostly be approved. Fixes for regressions will be considered with the highest priority. Any bug fix with a high risk of introducing regressions will be rejected.
  4. Examples of bad patterns to avoid for back porting changes from master:
  • Master PR is submitted that implicitly relies on other PRs in master; someone unrelated to the PR (not familiar with the dependency) triggers a backport and it merges.
  • Backports should have a mutual agreement between release managers, original PR submitter (if they are a maintainer), and original approvers.
    • A submission/approval to master doesn’t mean that person thinks it’s safe to backport.
    • PR marked as “Do not backport until X” in the description backported without X happening.
    • Reviewer 1 leaves critical comment on master PR; Reviewer 2 approves and it merges; Backport is done immediately after, and code with critical comments is shipped.
  1. The release managers for the 1.20 release are Xiaopeng Han, Aryan Gupta , and Jianpeng He. For any 1.20 release related questions, you can get in touch with us at the #release-1.20 slack channel.
  2. A few important and upcoming dates(tentative) related to the 1.20 release:
  • 10/19/2023: First build ready for testing
  • 11/01/2023: Code Freeze/ RC build released
  • 11/14/2023: 1.20 official release day

Please reach out if you have any questions or concerns.

Thank you for all your contributions.

Xiaopeng Han, on behalf of the 1.20 Release Manager team.