Patches not applied when target.namespace is specified

[bozho]

What happened?

I'm learning Flux, so I'm not sure if this is a Flux or a Kustomize behaviour issue (or a "me" issue :-). I'm deploying the podinfo example and trying to patch the HorizontalPodAutoscaler.

If I don't specify namespace in Flux's Kustomization spec.patches.target, the patch works. If I do specify it, it's not applied and there is no error message. Even if I specify a non-existent namespace, there is no error message.

What did you expect to happen?

The patch to be applied when target.namespace is specified.

How can we reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible)?

---
apiVersion: source.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1
kind: GitRepository
metadata:
  name: podinfo
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  interval: 1m0s
  ref:
    branch: master
  url: https://github.com/stefanprodan/podinfo
---
apiVersion: kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io/v1
kind: Kustomization
metadata:
  name: podinfo
  namespace: flux-system
spec:
  interval: 30m0s
  path: ./kustomize
  prune: true
  retryInterval: 2m0s
  sourceRef:
    kind: GitRepository
    name: podinfo
  targetNamespace: podinfo
  timeout: 3m0s
  wait: true
  patches:
    - target:
        name: podinfo
#        namespace: podinfo # Namespace podinfo exists.
        kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
      patch: |-
        apiVersion: autoscaling/v2
        kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
        metadata:
          name: podinfo
        spec:
          minReplicas: 2
          maxReplicas: 5

Expected output

NAMESPACE   NAME                                          REFERENCE            TARGETS              MINPODS   MAXPODS   REPLICAS   AGE
podinfo     horizontalpodautoscaler.autoscaling/podinfo   Deployment/podinfo   cpu: <unknown>/99%   2         5         2          99m

Actual output

NAMESPACE   NAME                                          REFERENCE            TARGETS              MINPODS   MAXPODS   REPLICAS   AGE
podinfo     horizontalpodautoscaler.autoscaling/podinfo   Deployment/podinfo   cpu: <unknown>/99%   2         4         2          99m

Kustomize version

5.4 (using Flux 2.4.0)

Operating system

Linux

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