This directory is the staging area for packages that have been split to their own repository. The content here will be periodically published to respective top-level k8s.io repositories.

The code in the staging/ directory is authoritative, i.e. the only copy of the code. You can directly modify such code.

The vendor/k8s.io directory contains symlinks pointing to this staging area, so to use a package in the staging area, you can import it as k8s.io/<package-name>, as if the package were vendored. Packages will be vendored from k8s.io/<package-name> for real after the test matrix is converted to vendor k8s components.