Improve external Contributor Experience

[mhutter]

Summary

As "an external contributor"
I want "to have a nice developer experience"
So that "I can contribute to this project effectively"

Context

The following things make for a bad DevEx right now:

• The PR template instructs you to set labels, which you cannot as a non-maintainer
• The CI workflows do not have necessary permissions to report back the problems encountered (may be fixed by setting permissions in the workflow definition)
• I cannot re-run CI workflows, which is especially bad since the e2e tests seem to be flaky
• Snyk also reported errors (e.g. in chart: Bump Tooling dependencies #904) but I am not able to view the report to figure out why

Out of Scope

No response

Further links

• chart: Bump Tooling dependencies #904
• https://github.com/k8up-io/k8up/actions/runs/6665480483/job/18115131321?pr=904#step:7:32
• Error: Failed to create checks using the provided token. (HttpError: Not Found) mikepenz/action-junit-report#23 (comment)

Acceptance Criteria

No response

Implementation Ideas

No response

[arska]

Some progress on this during recent housekeeping:

• PR template labels: Still an issue for external contributors. We've added Renovate auto-labeling in Update Renovate config to automerge low-risk dependencies #1153 to reduce label busywork on dependency PRs. For contributor PRs, maintainers still need to add labels manually — but this is a GitHub limitation (forks can't set labels).
• DCO sign-off: We've been proactively commenting on PRs that are missing sign-off with clear instructions on how to fix it (bug: truncate volume names to 63 characters in BackupController executor #1092, chart: use correct environment variables for globalResources #1070, docs: updated description volume types k8up can backup #1049, Preserve volumeMounts from PodConfig #1073, Fix Job Cleanup Ownership Bug in k8up #1075). The AGENTS.md (Add AGENTS.md for AI coding assistant context #1152) also documents the DCO requirement.
• Stale PRs: Closed 6 PRs that had been open 2+ years with no activity, with appreciative messages and an invitation to reopen.

Still open:

• CI workflow permissions for external PRs
• Ability for contributors to re-run CI
• Snyk report visibility