The Debian tech committee allows Kubernetes vendoring

Back in October, LWN looked at a conversation
within the Debian project regarding whether it was permissible to ship
Kubernetes bundled with some 200 dependencies. The Debian technical
committee has finally come
to a conclusion on this matter: this bundling is acceptable and the
maintainer will not be required to make changes:

Our consensus is that Kubernetes ought to be considered special in
the same way that Firefox is considered special -- we treat the
package differently from most other source packages because (i) it
is very large and complex, and (ii) upstream has significantly more
resources to keep all those moving parts up-to-date than Debian
does.

In the end, allowing this vendoring seemed like the only feasible way to
package Kubernetes for Debian.