This directory is a fork of the Kubernetes leader election package that includes prioritized leader election. These changes are required in order to make it so that the default revision wins leader elections and steals locks from non-default revisions. The changes were not upstreamed to k8s in time for the Istio 1.12 release.
Ideally, prioritized leader election gets upstreamed in the near future (KEP), and hopefully what gets merged isn‘t too far from what we have forked here (if it is, we’d have to potentially maintain migration code in our fork for a few releases before abandoning). Once merged we can abandon this forked code and use upstream again.