What happened?

ProviderReference field that exists in ResourceSpec is of type ObjectReference which has a lot of identifier such as name, namespace, uid, fieldpath etc. In some controllers, we call NamespacedNameOf function which returns an ObjectKey that includes the namespace. This is error-prone since users might add namespace and controller wouldn't be able to locate the object.

Provider objects are cluster-scoped and the type casting happens in managed resource reconciler, meaning its type is hard-coded in the codebase. So, we only need the name of the Provider object. We can have a type in crossplane-runtime like:

type ClusterScopedReference struct {
  APIVersion string `json:"apiVersion,omitempty"
  Kind            string `json:"kind,omitempty"
  Name         string `json:"name"

How can we reproduce it?

Create a managed resource with providerRef that has namespace field populated.

What environment did it happen in?

Crossplane version: 0.5.1