[PROPOSAL] Build Standards

[sam-herman]

What/Why

Pretty much all major plugins which we publish in distribution have build issues.
This creates a serious problem in onboarding new developers to the project and evaluating it by new partners.

What are you proposing?

To keep proper bar I propose to adopt the following standards:

1. MacOS build workflow as merge condition - all projects need to have a MacOS build workflow that pass as part of verification process. MacOS is an important development environment of many new developers.
2. Latest version of OpenSearch - All builds and tests are working against the latest version of OpenSearch
3. All builds pass in single command line without need of manual efforts for environment setup. (e.g. ./gradlew clean build on Java)

What is the developer experience going to be?

Single build command builds and tests any plugin in the project with passing green tests on all supported development platforms.

[krisfreedain]

thanks @sam-herman - do you believe the TSC should propose a standard before this is an open discussion in the https://github.com/opensearch-project/opensearch-build repo?

[sam-herman]

thanks @sam-herman - do you believe the TSC should propose a standard before this is an open discussion in the https://github.com/opensearch-project/opensearch-build repo?

My understanding is that the scope of https://github.com/opensearch-project/opensearch-build is a little different. It's more about how you release or test a distribution.
This suggestion is really about making all plugins buildable at all times. It's not about release or distribution. It's about establishing some basic technical engineering bar across the project.
I think it can definitely help to start an issue somewhere (else.g. build repo) to get feedback of the wider community. But TSC does need to make a decision that main branch should always be buildable at any time without broken tests and which platforms we are willing to prioritize. For example: Builds for MacOS, Windows, Linux should always work...
The "how" we can leave to the maintainers to chime in with suggestions.