[Retrospective] Release 1.2.0

[peternied]

The OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards Release 1.2.0 is currently in progress. To make sure that we do not lose issues that arose during the process please add them here. This issue will be updated after the release is finished.

How to use this issue?

Please add comments to this issue, they can be small or large in scope. Honest feedback is important to improve our processes, suggestions are also welcomed but not required.

What will happen to this issue post release?

There will be a discussion(s) about how the release went and how the next release can be improved. Then this ticket will be updated with the notes of that discussion along side action items.

[peternied]

Component tickets off of the 1.2.0 release issue don't have dates on them. It makes it hard to know what the critical dates are from a component. Originally this was by design to prevent dates from drifting away from the agreed central data source of the primary release ticket.

Possible solutions:

1. Have an automated task than checks for updates on the primary release ticket and trickles down date updates to component tasks.
2. See about getting an iframe/ or external loaded data source into the issue
3. Super hacky idea - create an issue that represents a milestone and update its title with a date which is loaded dynamically

[ylwu-amzn]

Checkstyle removed from OpenSearch opensearch-project/OpenSearch#1370, that caused AD plugin 1.2 build failed, took team hours to figure out why. We should notify all plugin teams about such changes in future.

[peternied]

Automate snapshot builds were being created and used by the distribution downloader tool and they were out of date #953. A few issues this exposed:

• We did not know that part of the build infrastructure broke
• We did not realize that we were testing again old bits until really close inspection was conduced, decompiling binaries
• We needed to re-run a number of test cases and this involved a manual reach out to all components
• We updated the release date on the project board and that felt a little too easy / hard to manage

[peternied]

Seeing random test failures, might be associated with out of data code that was copypasted
opensearch-project/common-utils#97

[peternied]

Random integration test failures seem to happen frequently, the starting point of a test failure investigation is 'is this a random failure' indication low trust in the test systems.

[dblock]

There was some confusion of what should and what should not be included in the manifest, see #974.

[dblock]

• Let's add to the template "All issues labelled 1.2.0 are closed" with a link to https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+user%3Aopensearch-project++label%3Av1.2.0+
• Do plugins need to do a GitHub release?