Story (Required)

As a maintainer of Builds for OpenShift (BoS), I want to decouple our release schedule from the Shipwright upstream project so that we can ship on our own timeline and ensure stability through curated downstream integration.

Acceptance Criteria:

• Establish Downstream Branching: A dedicated downstream branch (e.g., downstream/main or integration/main) is created as the primary source for product builds and releases.
• Implement Curated Ingestion: A process is established to periodically ingest upstream changes into the downstream branch via merges or cherry-picks, rather than automatically following tags.
• CI Gating: Ingestion of upstream changes must be gated by BoS-specific Continuous Integration (CI) and product tests to ensure stability before merging.
• Controlled Submodule Updates: If using submodules, updates must be treated as PR-controlled events (e.g., via automation/bots) that are only merged after passing CI.
• Independent Tagging: BoS releases are tagged directly off the downstream branch based on internal readiness, independent of upstream tagging events.

Technical Details & Implementation Notes:

• The goal is to move from "following tags" to "curating a downstream integration branch".
• This approach allows the team to ship even when the upstream is quiet or delay ingestion if the upstream is unstable.
• Ingestion Methods to Support:
• Merging upstream main.
• Cherry-picking specific commits.
• Merging upstream release-x.y branches.