Check for project existence in Project Maintainers list

[jeefy]

https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/project-maintainers.csv houses all the top-level maintainers for all CNCF projects. This is used to do things like allow access to CNCF's Service Desk.

We should validate that a project exists in this list and has at least one maintainer listed.

[tegioz]

Hi @jeefy 👋

A few thoughts about this check:

At the moment, checks are performed at the repository level, not at the project level. Everything has been built around this idea so far. This also fits when using the clomonitor-linter CLI (locally or from CI workflows), where the project entity does not exist.

I've been thinking a bit if we could make it work at the repository level. The CSV file has a field that contains a link to the project's maintainers file. We could try to match them by that url, but the problem is that sometimes it won't match the url of the primary repository setup in CLOMonitor (because the url listed is not related to the Github repo, like in the K8S or Prometheus cases, or because we use a different repo as primary). So this would work partially, but it wouldn't be very solid. If we could add an extra field to the CSV file with the project's primary repository it'd be much more reliable, but not sure if that's an option.

Another approach would be to relay on the project name even though the check would happen at the repository level. This can work for the tracking we do ourselves from our servers. However, when running the tool locally or from CI jobs, users would need to provide the project name manually, which isn't nice and error prone (they may not use exactly the same name, for example).

We'll keep thinking about this in case a better approach comes up.

On a different topic, I was thinking that it might be cool if we could make this work the other way around: generate the CSV from all the maintainers information collected from CLOMonitor. That way there would only be a single source of truth and the project-maintainer.csv file would always be up to date without requiring manual maintenance. The main problem to achieve this is that maintainers files are not using a standard format. But if this were to change, we could consider it 🙂

[jeefy]

The original idea of this is a check to validate we (CNCF) have added them to that Maintainers CSV, so I figured it would be an easy check to knock out.

That said, I love the direction you're thinking. There are some instances where we have to hand-massage the data to add in people, but overall I think we can try to automate the creation of this CSV. :)