When we're adding changes directly to the midstream repo, those changes are product related and most of the times should be cherry-picked into the each new release.

Release maintainer should cherry-pick those changes into new, created branch and that could be challenging, often due to a big list of those changes that needs to be remembered.

In order to ease the flow of the release branch creation, and cherry-picks of the changes, an automation could help us in this process.

We will add a new ci job that would check each new PR for specific label - "permanent-change" / "no-permanent-change".
Each author of each PR will be required to add such label, otherwise this ci job will fail.

Once PR merged, the automation that tracks downstream changes would add the commit and mark the PR as permanent.

Then, during the release flow, another automation (slash command maybe), would pick up those commits and cherry-picks them into the new created branch to ease the work on the release maintainer.