Expose referSameObject function

[keeganwitt]

If you are creating a new object, you may need a function to tie this new object to the lifecycle of the owners of the object being reconciled. For example, I have a controller that reconciles pods, which is writing secrets for the pods to use. In the case of a standalone pod, it's fine to just set the pod as an owner of this new secret using controllerutil.SetOwnerReference(). However, for pods which have an owner (ReplicaSets, DaemonSets, etc), the secret may be shared with all other related pods, as they are members of the same workload. This requires me to duplicate the logic of controllerutil.upsertOwnerRef() in my project, since I don't have the objects referred to by the pod's ownerReferences, only the references themselves and that function is not public. It would be useful in such cases to either make controllerutil.upsertOwnerRef() public, or expose that function through a new public function. If we add the ability to add an OwnerReference in this way, we should probably also add the ability to remove it as well.

[k8s-triage-robot]

The Kubernetes project currently lacks enough contributors to adequately respond to all issues.

This bot triages un-triaged issues according to the following rules:

• After 90d of inactivity, lifecycle/stale is applied
• After 30d of inactivity since lifecycle/stale was applied, lifecycle/rotten is applied
• After 30d of inactivity since lifecycle/rotten was applied, the issue is closed

You can:

• Mark this issue as fresh with /remove-lifecycle stale
• Close this issue with /close
• Offer to help out with Issue Triage

Please send feedback to sig-contributor-experience at kubernetes/community.

/lifecycle stale

[keeganwitt]

After the discussions in #2991, I think a better solution for the problem that spawned this issue is to expose the referSameObject() function (and possibly indexOwnerRef() too) which can be used for this and other use cases.

[keeganwitt]

/remove-lifecycle stale