[ANNOUNCE] Flink 1.16 Feature Freeze

[godfrey he <go...@gmail.com>]

Hi everyone,

The deadline for merging new features for Flink 1.16 has passed.

* From now on, only bug-fixes and documentation fixes / improvements are
allowed to be merged into the master branch.

* New features merged after this point can be reverted. If you need an
exception to this rule, please open a discussion on dev@ list and reach out
to us.

We plan to wait for the master branch to get a bit more stabilized before
cutting the "release-1.16" branch, in order to reduce the overhead of
having to manage two branches. That also means potentially delaying merging
new features for Flink 1.17 into the master branch. If you are blocked on
this, please let us know and we can come up with a compromise for the
branch cutting time.

What you can do to help with the release testing phase:

* The first release testing sync will be on *the 16th of August at 9am
CEST / 3pm China Standard Time*.
Everyone is welcome to join. The link can be found on the release wiki page
[1].

* Please prepare for the release testing by creating Jira tickets for
documentation and testing tasks for the new features under the
umbrella issue[2].
Tickets should be opened with Priority Blocker, FixVersion 1.16.0 and Label
release-testing (testing tasks only). It is greatly appreciated if
you can help to verify the new features.

* There are currently 55 test-stability issues affecting the 1.16.0 release
[3]. It is also greatly appreciated if you can help address some of them.

Best,
Martijn, Chesnay, Xingbo & Godfrey

[1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLINK/1.16+Release
[2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-28896
[3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?filter=12352149