Proposal - Add helm-charts repo to kubernetes-sig

[Steve Hipwell]

Hi All,

This is my first time posting here so apologies if I get anything wrong. I was pointed here after opening an issue kubernetes/community#5712 to propose adding a helm-charts repo to kubernetes-sigs.

The fundamentals of my proposal is to add a helm-charts repo to kubernetes-sigs to act as a central location for authoring Helm charts for kubernetes-sigs projects where the maintainers don't want the chart in their repo. The repo would then use GitHub actions to lint, test and release charts to the repo GitHub pages branch.

I'm not suggesting that this repo is the "correct" place for charts, that is a separate discussion, but without it there isn't a way to officially publish a chart when maintainers wont accept it into the primary repo.

Regards,

Steve

[Joe Thompson]

I think the major concern I have with this is, as pointed out in 5712, it would effectively become a monorepo, likely one repeating the helm stable/unstable repo adventure.  That's probably solvable with some scheme like setting up a "kubernetes-sigs-helm-contrib" organization or project that then hosts or links to separate repos, though that might have costs to the Kubernetes project that I don't know about.

Apart from that, it sounds like these charts would inherently tend to be charts for SIG projects not written by anyone in the SIG.  There are some abstract philosophical concerns I have with that, but the practical ones include things like:

* Alignment between the chart and the project's current best practices and future goals

* Alignment between the chart and prevalent patterns of end-user use of the project, especially as those patterns change over time

What these boil down to is "Is this chart a robust, usable way to consume this project's output, and will it continue to be so?"

I think mainly my expectation would be that if a Helm chart is a desirable way to package the work of a SIG, and a chart contributed to that SIG is solid, that that SIG in fact would then host it in their repo, and their reluctance to do so (in the absence of other info) would lead me to question if one of those two premises in fact isn't true of that chart.  There might be edge cases where the SIG agrees the chart is good on those criteria but still chooses not to host it, but I'd want to see more about what the reasons in such cases might be and if they might be solvable without creating an "out -of-tree charts" collection that will probably be tagged "beta" forever in most users' heads. -- Joe

[Steve Hipwell]

To clarify the charts in question here are expected to be based on the official yaml templates provided directly in the kubernetes-sigs projects, with idiomatic Helm chart patterns. Personally I'd like to see the charts in the repos but as this is being actively blocked a central repo seems like an expedient solution. This doesn't close any doors, but it unblocks the creation of official Helm charts.

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