kibana: evaluate feasibility of building from upstream source

[mascguy (Christopher Nielsen)]

Presently, kibana utilizes upstream's published binaries, due to various technical challenges related to building.

The details are as follows, taken from a brief commit-related discussion between Steve Smith and myself:

Longer-term, it would definitely be preferable to build from source. Have you taken a look at what's involved? (Not an emergency though.)

I tried that at first, but it's tough and now involves bazel, so I just threw in the towel and downloaded the build that Elastic provides.

In addition to the necessity of figuring out the bazel build, it's not clear to me how stable their build process is right now, and I perceive a possible risk of a lot of maintenance to keep up as that process evolves. I don't have any special insight though.

See: ​https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2021-September/043697.html

One key challenge, per the linked mailing list discussion, relates to conflicting inter-dependencies of the various Node/NPM ports. So that is very much a critical path for this work; tracked by issue:63035.

Once the latter has been tackled, this should be more feasible. But with the caveat mentioned by Steve, which is that upstream may be a moving target.

We'll have a better idea once the Node/NPM conflicts have been addressed, over the next few months. And perhaps upstream's build process may be more stable by then. Still TBD though.

[essandess (Steve Smith)]

Thanks for trying to tackle this. Also note that if you can figure out how to build Kibana from source, you’ll probably be able to do the same for Elasticsearch, which is currently a prebuilt download.

[mascguy (Christopher Nielsen)]

Ticket covering source build for elasticsearch: issue:63719

[mascguy (Christopher Nielsen)]

Too much on my plate already

[essandess (Steve Smith)]

Just as well—A lot has changed in this space.

When I get more cycles, I’m migrating my own effort to support OpenSearch and its Kibana-equivalent OpenSearch Dashboards. I view the current Elasticsearch and Kibana versions as the last or nearly last of the line as Elastic closes down their model.