Publish Iceberg kafka connect runtime to Confluent hub

[ajantha-bhat]

Feature Request / Improvement

We should publish the OSS Apache Iceberg kafka connecter sink to confluent hub to get the wider visibility under "apache Iceberg" account.
Similar to https://www.confluent.io/hub/tabular/iceberg-kafka-connect

Query engine

Kafka Connect

[ajantha-bhat]

cc: @bryanck, @danielcweeks, @jbonofre

[jbonofre]

It makes sense to me. I would also include the Kafka connect artifact on https://iceberg.apache.org/releases/

[amogh-jahagirdar]

Naive question, for 1.8 are we saying that we're aiming for automation to push to Confluent Hub or is it something that for the 1.8 milestone, someone needs to manually do? If we're saying we want some automation for pushing, I feel like we should punt to the next release since i think that requires infra changes (e.g. I'm not sure if they even allow it, but if they did probably we'd need a key and whatnot)

cc @bryanck @ajantha-bhat @jbonofre

[bryanck]

Previously w/ the Tabular connector it was a manual process, we had a contact at Confluent that would upload it after performing some validation. We'd want a signed and published connector distribution before we'd tackle this I think.

[thjaeckle]

I understand that this is a more complicated thing to do than uploading an artifact.
For the just released 1.9.0, however, there is as well no artifact for the Kafka Connect package uploaded, mentioned also already in #11685 for 1.7.0.

It is quite cumbersome to locally build and add it to a Docker image, every adopter of Kafka Connect has to do the same. Can I somehow support on this issue?

[manuzhang]

@thjaeckle Feel free to open a PR (or draft PR) if you've got it working.