Please publish opensearch-custom-codecs as a .jar to Maven Central for easy integration

Hi team,

Thank you for the work on custom-codecs — it’s an excellent resource for building custom Lucene compression codecs.

I am currently working on opensearch-migrations, which is a gradle-based project utilizing several lucene libraries, and I noticed that the latest Maven Central artifact for opensearch-custom-codecs:3.0.0.0 is published as a .zip file (intended for plugin distribution)

This .zip contains the actual .jar (opensearch-custom-codecs-3.0.0.0.jar), but because it’s not published as a standalone artifact, it cannot be consumed directly via Gradle or Maven in other Java projects without extra steps like:
• Manually unzipping the plugin file
• Installing the .jar into mavenLocal, or
• Writing custom Gradle logic to extract it from the .zip

Request:
Could you please also publish the opensearch-custom-codecs-3.0.0.0.jar as a first-class .jar artifact to Maven Central alongside the .zip plugin? This would make it much easier for developers to Import this project as a regular dependency.

I am happy to help contribute if needed.

Thank you once again!

The issue names no source files, tests, or publication entry points, so start by locating the build and release configuration that produces the existing Maven Central ZIP. Verify how the embedded opensearch-custom-codecs JAR is published, then ensure a standalone JAR artifact is released alongside the ZIP and can be consumed directly by Gradle or Maven.