EPIC: Move the Nephio Porch repo to the kptdev CNCF project

[liamfallon]

See Nephio 1087

As part of the Nephio re-architecture work, SIG Network Architecture has proposed moving the Porch repository from Nephio to the CNCF kpt project. See the SIG-Network Architecture minutes from 2026-03-30. This will allow Nepio to focus on Telco use-case driven work and move the non-telco porch work to the general purpose kpt project.

The reasoning for the proposal is as follows

• Neither kpt or porch are telco-specific
• The CNCF community is much bigger and has much more visibility, opening Porch to a much wider user community and to wider engagement and use
• 20,000 lines of cloned kpt code has already been refactored out of Porch (the porch improvements were merged into kpt) so Porch already uses much of the kpt codebase
• It would make maintainability easier if the common code could be maintained together with the kpt and porch code
• Nephio as a community is better served to deliver use cases on top of a fully “CNCF” toolchain rather than developing a lot of bespoke code in a telco-specific project
• Nephio would benefit from a Porch that has a much wider base community than just the Telco community

From a development point of view

• Many of the key developers are operating in both communities
• Many users or potential users of kpt are looking for the type of functionality offered by porch, and having it in the same community lowers the barrier to engagement for those users
• The current independent Porch release process will continue, Porch and kpt will continue to have independent release cycles to keep the flexibility of being able to release Porch independent of kpt if required
• Dependencies between kpt and Porch will be easier to handle: if a new feature is implemented and released in kpt, a Porch release can be scheduled following the kpt release to take advantage of the new kpt feature
• The kpt project has attracted a number of new contributors in kpt since it was revived in the CNCF

Actions should the repository move be agreed by the Nephio TSC

• Move the Porch issues from the Nephio issue list into the Issues list on the Porch repo prior to moving it over to kpt
• The https://github.com/nephio-project/porch repository is moved to https://github.com/kptdev/porch by the LFN/CNCF
• The Porch CI is moved to the kpt project and re-established there
• A release of the Porch is performed in the kptdev CNCF project
• The Nephio code is updated to use the kptdev porch as a dependency
• The Porch package in the nephio catalog repo is updated to use the kptdev porch
• Keep separate kpt and porch issue lists in kptdev for now because otherwise the list will be too long, in time we will move to a single issue list in kpt and remove the separate Porch list

Proposed Timeline

The proposed timeline is to complete the porch transfer for the next Nephio release (Nephio R7) at the end of Q2 2026.