Publish separate artifacts for different Flink versions

[wuchong]

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Motivation

Our current mechanism for supporting multiple Flink versions is not highly feasible. Ensuring compatibility across different Flink versions becomes challenging when a feature is unavailable in older versions. For instance, the DISTRIBUTED BY clause in DDL was introduced in Flink 1.20. For another instance, an old API has been entirely removed in Flink 2.0, while the new APIs do not exist in earlier versions. As a result, we are forced to implement different implementations for different Flink versions.

Solution

This approach is a common practice adopted by projects like Iceberg, Hudi, and Paimon to support multiple versions of Flink or Spark: one module per version.

Anything else?

No response

Willingness to contribute

• I'm willing to submit a PR!