The reference documentation for the Kubernetes API is generated at the end of every release cycle. Due to difficulties with the tools used to do this, and the state of that tool's documentation, intimate knowledge of how the tool works is required and generating the reference docs can only reliably be performed by one specific person. Currently, it is possible for the generator to fail at multiple points in the process. Many of these failures are entirely undocumented and without any error handling.

While a full rebuild of the reference docs generator would be great, this is not reasonably achievable within a single 12-week LFX Mentorship cycle. Instead, we would like to see improvements to the existing generator in the following ways:

• Refactoring of existing code to make it less brittle and prone to failure, up to completely rewriting some aspects of the tooling
• Improvement of existing error handling to provide clear error messages when failures do occur
• Improvement of existing documentation to ease onboarding and cover solutions for known failure modes

Ideally, it should be possible for new contributors who are not intimately familiar with the Reference Generator codebase to reliably produce the reference docs each cycle, so that this responsibility can be offloaded from SIG Docs to the Release Docs lead.