Over the last few years, the OpenSearch project has only published 2 patch releases not including the LTS branches of the previous major version. Those patches are 2.11.1 and 2.17.1.

2.11.1 - The patch release in 2.11 was to fix an issue in decompression: opensearch-project/OpenSearch#10802

2.17.1 - The patch release in 2.17 was to fix a dashboards issue on Discover page: opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards#8302 (I believe the corresponding PR for that was opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards#8274)

In both cases, the effort to produce a patch was quite high across all of the components of default distribution of OpenSearch.

I think we need more flexibility in patch releases, particularly if only one component (i.e. plugin or dashboards-plugin) would like to perform an out-of-band release for a critical fix in that plugin.

I'm filing this issue to identify any challenges in the patch release process in an aim to streamline this process.

I think the project should strive to get to a point where if it needs to perform a patch release for 3.x and 2.19.x simultaneously, that we can do that.