Fix flaky TestMinScaleAnnotationChange by waiting for scale convergence

[brucearctor]

What

Fix the recurring flaky TestMinScaleAnnotationChange e2e test by adding a waitForDesiredScale call before ensureDesiredScale.

Why

The test calls ensureDesiredScale (which asserts scale stability for 30s) immediately after the Configuration reports Ready. However, the KPA reconciles scale asynchronously — the deployment may not have reached the target replica count yet when Ready is reported. If the scale is briefly at 0 during KPA convergence, ensureDesiredScale catches that transient state and hard-fails.

This has been auto-reported as flaky twice and auto-closed both times without a real fix:

• [flaky] test/e2e.TestMinScaleAnnotationChange #16527 (April 2026 — auto-closed)
• [flaky] test/e2e.TestMinScaleAnnotationChange #16653 (June 2026 — auto-closed)
• Nightly failure July 21, 2026: build log

Fix

Add waitForDesiredScale (polls up to 3 min for convergence) before ensureDesiredScale (asserts stability for 30s). This matches the pattern already used in the annotation-change loop body (line 443), which does not exhibit this flake.

Other call sites

Lines 134, 203, 308, and 341 in the same file have the same ensureDesiredScale-without-convergence-wait pattern. These could also be flaky but are not currently failing. Happy to fix those in a follow-up PR if maintainers agree.

/kind bug

[knative-prow]

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[knative-prow]

Welcome @brucearctor! It looks like this is your first PR to knative/serving 🎉

[knative-prow]

Hi @brucearctor. Thanks for your PR.

I'm waiting for a knative member to verify that this patch is reasonable to test. If it is, they should reply with /ok-to-test on its own line. Until that is done, I will not automatically test new commits in this PR, but the usual testing commands by org members will still work.

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[linkvt]

/ok-to-test

[brucearctor]

@linkvt -- the build job in the kind-e2e workflow is failing across PRs (e.g. #16668, #16655) with Get "https://registry.local:5000/v2/": http: server gave HTTP response to HTTPS client. Looks like ko is trying HTTPS despite the *.local insecure override in go-containerregistry. Might be a ko version / registry:3.0.0 interaction. Happy to dig in if helpful.

[linkvt]

Sure! It just seems like your change shouldn't have caused this and other recent PRs dont fail, I thought we usually pin all versions.
Maybe a flake, even if the error doesnt sound like one...

/retest

[brucearctor]

Thanks for the retest @linkvt! Same failure on retry — looks persistent, not a flake.

I dug in a bit:

• The build job in kind-e2e.yaml starts registry:3.0.0 on port 5000 (HTTP, no TLS)
• ko resolve then tries to push via HTTPS → Get "https://registry.local:5000/v2/": http: server gave HTTP response to HTTPS client
• go-containerregistry has a *.local → HTTP override, but something in the current ko version (setup-ko@v0.9) seems to not be honoring it
• Same failure on PR Bump the github-actions group across 1 directory with 3 updates #16655 (dependabot) — not specific to this PR

This is probably a #productivity / CI infra issue. Happy to file a separate issue if that would be helpful.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 80.29%. Comparing base (dbce551) to head (61a6415).

Additional details and impacted files

@@           Coverage Diff           @@
##             main   #16668   +/-   ##
=======================================
  Coverage   80.29%   80.29%           
=======================================
  Files         217      217           
  Lines       13568    13568           
=======================================
  Hits        10895    10895           
  Misses       2308     2308           
  Partials      365      365           

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[linkvt]

@brucearctor I created PR #16669 to work around the issue, CI passes and the PR now waits for a maintainer review.