Finalizer patch on the pod may overwrite other changes to the finalizer

[troychiu]

What happened:
In our cluster, I noticed that a change to the pod's finalizer was reverted when Kueue attempted to remove its own finalizer. I found we are using non-strict mode patch

kueue/pkg/controller/jobs/pod/pod_controller.go

Line 514 in 18874ed

return clientutil.Patch(ctx, c, pod, false, func() (bool, error) {

, resulting in the race condition.

What you expected to happen:
Kueue should not overwrite other changes to the finalizer.

How to reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible):
Create a pod with finalizers in addition to Kueue's finalizer. However, this issue doesn't always occur.

Anything else we need to know?:

Environment:

• Kubernetes version (use kubectl version):
• Kueue version (use git describe --tags --dirty --always):
• Cloud provider or hardware configuration:
• OS (e.g: cat /etc/os-release):
• Kernel (e.g. uname -a):
• Install tools:
• Others:

[mbobrovskyi]

/assign @mykysha

[troychiu]

I can create a PR for this