Cross-version compatibility tests

[KnVerey]

Eschewed features

• This issue is not requesting templating, unstuctured edits, build-time side-effects from args or env vars, or any other eschewed feature.

What would you like to have added?

A test suite along the lines of https://github.com/kubernetes/api/tree/master/testdata for the Kustomization type. It could also cover Component, though that uses the same struct at time of writing. Ideally it would also cover built-in transformer types as well, since their schemas are effectively exposed through the generators/transformers fields.

Why is this needed?

To prevent backwards-incompatible and breaking changes from being made to a given version of our APIs (types) across kustomize CLI and module versions. The change in the meaning of the patches is a historical example of what this should prevent:
kubernetes/kubernetes#116598 (comment)

Can you accomplish the motivating task without this feature, and if so, how?

We're currently relying on maintainers knowing the rules and catching violations in code review.

What other solutions have you considered?

If we only need to cover the one core type, maybe we could do something more crude more quickly? Like copy the type as is somewhere and have a test fail with a message about the API change policies to try to help reviewers notice?

Anything else we should know?

No response

Feature ownership

• I am interested in contributing this feature myself! 🎉

[k8s-ci-robot]

This issue is currently awaiting triage.

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[k8s-triage-robot]

This issue has not been updated in over 1 year, and should be re-triaged.

You can:

• Confirm that this issue is still relevant with /triage accepted (org members only)
• Close this issue with /close

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/remove-triage accepted