Contributing to Kubernetes is harder than it should be and problems have unclear owners

[BenTheElder]

Preserving this from a slack discussion in #sig-contribex as requested.

Will cleanup later. CC @cblecker @dims @nikhita

Pasted from slack:

---

IMHO a lot of them the problem is mostly "who owns this?"

• presubmits are awful ... -- bug testing? release? some other sig? who owns what tests run in presubmit?
  -- slow (> 1 hour long!) an inordinately flaky (can be 50+ /retest!)
  -- most of them can't be replicated locally without significant effort and $$ / access to cloud
  -- test output is often incomprehensible across the board, identifying actual causes is an art form

• staging can be very painful and confusing, especially if you've never seen it before ... -- unclear if there is any interest in ever removing that

• dev tools (hack,/, build/) are all thousands of lines of elaborate bash importing more elaborate and sometimes esoteric bash ... -- no sig really owns these? and the people that have OWNERS are all super busy

• we bury your PR in mountains of text / comment spam. -- testing? contribex?

• getting active approvers on your PR is something of an art form, we auto assign reviewers but many of them I've never seen review anything in a year or more -- who knows? contribex? testing?

... that's probably just a few of them, I don't really know who I'd bug to get any of those fixed because it's unclear who really owns them.

---

[beezerbt]

Thanks to @BenTheElder for this raising this issue.
I want to write Golang code, and I am a huge fan of K8s.
So I am really, i mean really motivated to contribute.
Even if it means starting with documentation.

However the K8s landscape is bewildering.
So I totally concur.

I mean whats the difference between kubernetes and kubernetes/community.
A one line explanation would suffice in the README in either project.
Maybe I miss something (hahaha) but there is no overall view of the codebase.
Then there is the website...and so on.

I want to contribute, which is how I found myself here, but surely it must be easier than this.
Non?

[BenTheElder]

I mean whats the difference between kubernetes and kubernetes/community.

FWIW the README in this repo does mention what it is for.
https://github.com/kubernetes/community#kubernetes-community

Welcome to the Kubernetes community!

This is the starting point for joining and contributing to the Kubernetes community - improving docs, improving code, giving talks etc.

To learn more about the project structure and organization, please refer to Project Governance information.

Further down it goes on to explain more. This repo is for community docs etc., github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes contains much of the "main" project code. I suggest reading through some of the links in this repo's README to get started 😅

However the K8s landscape is bewildering.

I want to contribute, which is how I found myself here, but surely it must be easier than this.

I think that's a separate problem that I'm not really sure what can be done about or where it would be tracked... Here we're tracking the difficulty in accomplishing a pull request to the main repo. I will think about how to clarify this issue, it was mostly filed to preserve a discussion about this problem in the community slack 😅

[parispittman]

@castrojo and @nzouedi are going to help break this down into chunks for us! yay

[fejta-bot]

Issues go stale after 90d of inactivity.
Mark the issue as fresh with /remove-lifecycle stale.
Stale issues rot after an additional 30d of inactivity and eventually close.

If this issue is safe to close now please do so with /close.

Send feedback to sig-testing, kubernetes/test-infra and/or fejta.
/lifecycle stale

[nikhita]

/remove-lifecycle stale

[vishakhanihore]

/lifecycle frozen