[DRAFT]: Modeling splitting out API into its own module

[aryangorwade]

Description

This is a PR splitting /api into a standalone module, as described in this design doc, this would serve to fix GPU Operator versioning issues (Go only allows v0.x.y and v1.x.y).

This architectural split involves:

• Moving dependencies external to api/ into /api to avoid circular imports
• Splitting API into its standalone module with its own go.mod and go.sum; root go.mod references this module now

CI checks introduced:

• PR check ensuring shared module dependencies stay in sync
• Post-release (after tagging) check ensuring compiled binary versions match tags
• PR check ensuring version bump PRs do not reference preexisting API tags (checks for "operator", "version", "bump" in PR title)

Changes to CI pipeline:

• Modified .nvidia-ci.yaml and .common-ci.yaml to ensure that tagging a release commit with operator and api tags does not cause a separate release process to trigger for the api tag in addition to the operator tag

Dependabot changes:

• Modified dependabot.yaml using group-by: dependency-name and a cross-directory pattern to update each shared dependency between both modules in one PR (one PR per dependency; for both modules). Note that groups such as k8s.io/* can be created, resulting in one cross-directory PR for all deps under k8s.io/*.

Checklist

• No secrets, sensitive information, or unrelated changes
• Lint checks passing (make lint)
• Generated assets in-sync (make validate-generated-assets)
• Go mod artifacts in-sync (make validate-modules)

Testing

None done yet as this is a sample PR.