Importing Kubectl Descriptor Results In Kustomize Incompatible Error - go

Question

My project references to many public APIs, and it looks like they conflict with each other and results compilation error.
Here is my go.mod
module github.com/apulis/job-scheduler
go 1.16
require (
github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/spark-on-k8s-operator v0.0.0-20210804054248-85b549ebc4ae
github.com/alecthomas/template v0.0.0-20190718012654-fb15b899a751
github.com/apulis/sdk/go-utils v0.0.0
github.com/apulis/simple-gin-logger v0.0.0
github.com/gin-gonic/contrib v0.0.0-20201101042839-6a891bf89f19
github.com/gin-gonic/gin v1.7.1
github.com/google/uuid v1.1.1
github.com/kubeflow/kfserving v0.6.0
github.com/myesui/uuid v1.0.0 // indirect
github.com/sirupsen/logrus v1.8.1
github.com/spf13/viper v1.7.0
github.com/stretchr/testify v1.7.0
github.com/swaggo/gin-swagger v1.3.1
github.com/swaggo/swag v1.7.1
github.com/twinj/uuid v1.0.0
gopkg.in/natefinch/lumberjack.v2 v2.0.0
gopkg.in/stretchr/testify.v1 v1.2.2 // indirect
gorm.io/driver/mysql v1.1.2
gorm.io/driver/postgres v1.1.0
gorm.io/gorm v1.21.13
k8s.io/api v0.19.6
k8s.io/apimachinery v0.19.6
k8s.io/client-go v11.0.1-0.20190805182717-6502b5e7b1b5+incompatible
k8s.io/klog/v2 v2.2.0
)
replace (
k8s.io/api => k8s.io/api v0.19.6
k8s.io/apiextensions-apiserver => k8s.io/apiextensions-apiserver v0.19.6
k8s.io/apimachinery => k8s.io/apimachinery v0.19.6
k8s.io/apiserver => k8s.io/apiserver v0.19.6
k8s.io/cli-runtime => k8s.io/cli-runtime v0.19.6
k8s.io/client-go => k8s.io/client-go v0.19.6
k8s.io/cloud-provider => k8s.io/cloud-provider v0.19.6
k8s.io/cluster-bootstrap => k8s.io/cluster-bootstrap v0.19.6
k8s.io/code-generator => k8s.io/code-generator v0.19.6
k8s.io/component-base => k8s.io/component-base v0.19.6
k8s.io/cri-api => k8s.io/cri-api v0.19.6
k8s.io/csi-translation-lib => k8s.io/csi-translation-lib v0.19.6
k8s.io/kube-aggregator => k8s.io/kube-aggregator v0.19.6
k8s.io/kube-controller-manager => k8s.io/kube-controller-manager v0.19.6
k8s.io/kube-proxy => k8s.io/kube-proxy v0.19.6
k8s.io/kube-scheduler => k8s.io/kube-scheduler v0.19.6
k8s.io/kubectl => k8s.io/kubectl v0.19.6
k8s.io/kubelet => k8s.io/kubelet v0.19.6
k8s.io/kubernetes => k8s.io/kubernetes v1.19.6
k8s.io/legacy-cloud-providers => k8s.io/legacy-cloud-providers v0.19.6
k8s.io/metrics => k8s.io/metrics v0.19.6
k8s.io/node-api => k8s.io/node-api v0.19.6
k8s.io/sample-apiserver => k8s.io/sample-apiserver v0.19.6
k8s.io/sample-cli-plugin => k8s.io/sample-cli-plugin v0.19.6
k8s.io/sample-controller => k8s.io/sample-controller v0.19.6
)
Below are the outputs:
git submodule init
git submodule update
go build -buildmode=pie -o bin/scheduler cmd/main.go
# sigs.k8s.io/kustomize/pkg/transformers/config
/root/go/pkg/mod/sigs.k8s.io/kustomize#v2.0.3+incompatible/
pkg/transformers/config/factorycrd.go:71:47:
cannot use api.Schema.SchemaProps.Properties (type
spec.SchemaProperties) as type myProperties in argument to
looksLikeAk8sType
The project compiles successfully until I added the kubectl/pkg/descriptor. I want to use those apis from kubectl.
To my surprise below code snippet works fine!!
package main
import (
desc "k8s.io/kubectl/pkg/describe"
"fmt"
)
func main() {
config := &desc.DescriberSettings{}
fmt.Println(config)
return
}
How to solve this issue?

Answer 1

If the subproject with the obsolete dependency is yours you can update the dependency version of the project and it will work after.
If the project is not yours then you can fork the project, update it's dependencies and from your top level project import your fork.
Your question is general and not Kubernetes specific yet you could ask around the maintainers why a minor version of their package contains breaking changes.

Answer 2

The culprit is that until relatively recent Kubernetes versions (1.21), kubectl integrated a very old version of kustomize (2.0.3). In your case, you're using kubernetes components of 0.19 which are only one year old, and kustomize 2.0.3 which is three years old. Kubernetes 1.21 finally updated kustomize that was built into kubectl after both projects managed to use compatible dependencies, and this kind of issues hopefully won't happen for the recent builds on recent components.
The particular issue that you've faced with is probably the one documented in kustomize. If it's the case, you can either update Kubernetes components to some version newer that 0.21 or downgrade k8s.io/kube-openapi. To confirm whether it's the issue, check out which version of k8s.io/kube-openapi is pulled into the dependency graph:
go list -m k8s.io/kube-openapi
If it's after v0.0.0-20210323165736, you can try using an older version:
go mod edit -replace k8s.io/kube-openapi=k8s.io/kubeopenapi#v0.0.0-20210323165736-1a6458611d18
I suppose that fix the problem, since most often people bump dependency version when it's not actually needed, but if doesn't help, you might try downgrade other dependent packages too. You can find a dependency path to mentioned package by:
go mod why -m k8s.io/kube-openapi