1.3 Release Branch Cut

Subject: 1.3 Release Branch Cut

Hi Istio community,

  1. As of yesterday (August 13th 2019), the release-1.3 branch was cut for Istio and we are freezing it.

  2. Romain Lenglet, Steve Dake, and Brian Avery will be your release managers for the 1.3 release.
    Following freeze, changes to the 1.3 branch (planned to be released on September 10th 2019), must be approved by the release managers, and any changes that do not have a comment from the release managers will not be merged.

  3. Any requests for late arriving features must be approved by the TOC.

  4. Bug fixes will mostly be accepted to the 1.3 branch. They must pass all required tests and be approved.
    Fixes for regressions will be considered with the highest priority. Fixes for new features will be considered in the context of that feature and the risk associated with merging them. Any bug fix for a new feature with a high risk of introducing regressions in older features will be rejected.

  5. In order to simplify the branch management work, to get changes into the 1.3 branch, they must be contributed first to master then cherry-picked into 1.3.

  6. Commits with no-risk of impacting stability during our tests (changes improving documentation, comments or other cosmetic changes) will mostly be approved by the release managers.

  7. All the work done on master and not merged in 1.3 will naturally be released along with the 1.4 release.

Please reach out if you have any questions or concerns, and thank you for helping us to stabilize the 1.3 release!

Note that the doc repo (istio/istio.io) works differently than other repos. All work targeting 1.3 is still happening in the master branch, and the release-1.3 branch will be created the day of the 1.3 launch.

Keep on docing!

Tips for cherry-picking changes into the release-1.3 branch (except istio/istio.io):

  • All new PRs must be merged into master before being backported into release-1.3.
  • You should let the bot create the backport PR for your master PR. This can be done before merging the master PR by adding the “cherrypick/release-1.3” label.
  • After the master PR has been merged, just adding the “cherrypick/release-1.3” label has no effect (it’s ignored by the bot). You must add a “/cherrypick release-1.3” comment to the master PR. This will be picked up by the bot to create the backport PR.