Pact language implementation compatibility suite

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Problem
Maintainers of a Pact client language currently lack a detailed implementation and ongoing maintenance guide. The Pact ecosystem and feature suite is also quite vast, and it can be hard to know when a client language is "done".

Solution
In consultation with the open source maintainer and contributor community, PactFlow will be building a set of guides, tutorials/workshops, test criteria and a reference language that demonstrates how to use the various SDKs to create a feature complete language.

Called "Maintainer Experience", it is an accessible set of educational materials, and improvements to our core SDKs to simplify the experience for maintainers and community contributors contributing to the ecosystem.

The Test compatibility suite is a BDD acceptance testing suite (written in gherkin) that covers all of the Pact behaviour required to achieve full language support/parity.

Each language would pull in the BDD suite and implement the scenarios they support. It’s a Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) type model. Initially, this would be added to the Pact JVM and Rust languages

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The compatibility suite is currently in progress here:
https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-compatibility-suite/

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Current examples

• pact-rust
• pact-jvm
• pact-php
• pact-python
• pact-ruby-ffi

Requests for New ones

• Verify Pact-Ruby against pact-compatibility-suite pact-foundation/pact-ruby#321
• Verify Pact-Go against pact-compatibility-suite pact-foundation/pact-go#449
• Verify Pact-JS against pact-compatibility-suite pact-foundation/pact-js#1235