REQUEST: Allow public visibility for Github Packages for kubernetes-sigs/minikube-os #6358

Organization or Repo

kubernetes-sigs/minikube-os

Name of integration

github packages

Link to integration website

https://github.com/orgs/kubernetes-sigs/packages/container/minikube-os%2Fkicbase/settings

Describe what is attempting to be accomplished

Trying to change this from private to public:

Per Slack Conversations

• https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/C01672LSZL0/p1778093151070789
• https://kubernetes.slack.com/archives/CCK68P2Q2/p1778086780563279

Description
We are currently working on moving minikube images out of internal Google infrastructure and into the community. To unblock this migration, we are requesting the ability to publish public GitHub Packages (specifically container images to ghcr.io) for the kubernetes-sigs/minikube-os repository.

Currently, our GitHub Actions can push images to ghcr.io, but they default to private. We need them to be publicly accessible for our CI/CD workflows and testing to function correctly.

Why standard k8s staging registries don't work for this use case
We are fully aware of and intend to use registry.k8s.io for our official releases. However, we have a unique challenge with our PR builds:

High Volume of Components: We build 40-50 component images in the base image on PRs. It is entirely impractical to make 40-50 image promotion PRs for intermediate images that are only valid between releases.

PR Collisions: We need to test every PR with a base image built specifically for that PR before merging it back to master. If we rely on a shared staging registry, multiple PRs building at the same time will overwrite the "latest" staging tags and collide with each other.

Cron Job Instability: Because of these overwrites, master would end up pulling unpredictable intermediate staging images, which will drastically mess up our flake rates for cron jobs.

Proposed Solution & Lifecycle
Enabling public ghcr.io access for this repo gives us a temporary, isolated place to push these ephemeral PR build images.

We plan to name these temporary images kic-builds (or similar).

Once a cycle is complete and we are ready for a release, we will promote the finalized images to registry.k8s.io.

Cleanup: We are absolutely willing to prune or delete these temporary build images from ghcr.io after a release if that makes this request easier to approve or helps manage storage quotas.

Could we get public package publishing enabled for kubernetes-sigs/minikube-os to help us unblock our migration out of Google internal infra?

Thank you!

Additional context for request

No response