From X-Pack Removal to GA: Five Months, 82 PRs
Mihir Soni included inOn January 30th, 2021, I merged a PR called “Remove x-pack directory” into a repo that had existed for about five hours. Today, July 12th, AWS put out “OpenSearch 1.0 launches”, and opensearch.org posted its own GA announcement. Between those two dates I merged 82 pull requests into OpenSearch Dashboards. Writing down the whole arc here while it’s still fresh:
January 30 – February 23: pulling Elastic out. Eleven PRs stripping the x-pack directory, disabling telemetry that phoned home to Elastic, getting a basic CI pipeline running. Nobody outside the team saw any of this. The repo was private, the project didn’t have a name people knew yet, and the work was entirely “make sure this thing legally and technically stands on its own.”
March 3 – March 19: the rename. This is the biggest single chunk — 49 PRs in seventeen days, renaming every kbn-* package to osd-*, directory by directory, because doing it all at once would have made a broken build impossible to debug. Sixty percent of everything I shipped on this project happened in these seventeen days.
March 22 – April 10: getting ready to be looked at. License headers, README and CONTRIBUTING updates, a URL that still pointed at opensearch.co two days before launch and needed fixing. Eighteen PRs of the kind of housekeeping you only do once you know strangers are about to show up.
April 12: the announcement. “Introducing OpenSearch” went out to the world. I watched it happen from the inside, already knowing every commit that made it true.
April 15 – May 13: the last stretch. Bumping the version to 1.0.0, a typo fix in a rename script, one more docs pass on the README and CONTRIBUTING guide. Small PRs, but the kind that matter when you’re closing out a release.
July 12: GA. OpenSearch 1.0 was generally available. Five months and change after that first commit.
Most of the five months wasn’t glamorous — directory-by-directory renames, license header updates, fixing a URL two days before launch. No single PR in that list is interesting on its own. It’s 82 PRs, done mostly by hand, that happened to hold together when people looked at it on April 12th and again today.
Not sure what happens to it from here. That’s up to whoever picks it up and runs it. But it’s a good feeling to sit here on GA day and remember it started with a directory called x-pack that needed to come out.