Have the maintainers of OpenSearch-build weighted in on what changes will need to be made (if any) to support this update?

@peternied Yes. See #251, or this comment more specifically regarding opensearch-build.

Rather than rewriting this section what do you think of removing the branching documentation from the project-wide guidance ... When this documentation was originally written it was about formalizing a unified plan - mostly for the purposes of getting core & plugin teams aligned. With this new update it seems like we are getting close to letting individual repos be ruled by what works best for them conventions rather than a policy for the entire project.

The existing documentation defines the branching strategy for the distribution (albeit spread across two sections "OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards Branching" and "Plugin Branching") and then the "Single Repo Artifacts Branching" section says that those repos follow a different strategy (i.e. what works best for them). This update isn't changing the structure of that. It's just changing the distribution branching strategy (and restructuring the sections to hopefully make things more clear). We don't have to define the distribution strategy here as it is not truly project-wide. But if we don't define it here, where would you suggest that it go? It could go in opensearch-build, but my fear is that not too many folks turn to that repo as a source of documentation.

But if we don't define it here, where would you suggest that it go? It could go in opensearch-build, but my fear is that not too many folks turn to that repo as a source of documentation.

I'm not sure that this repo is any better for discoverability, but we've already got it here 🤷 . If you are fine with the overhead of making changes in this repo with additional process - that is fine with me.