opentelemetry-collector/docs/rfcs/release-approvers.md

OpenTelemetry Collector Releases approvers

Problem statement

Release engineering requires a different set of skills and interests than developing the Collector codebase. As such, the set of contributors for the Collector releases has overlap with but is different from the set of contributors for the Collector codebase. We are missing out on retaining people who are more interested in these aspects. We can see this with the examples of the OpenTelemetry Operator repository and the OpenTelemetry Collector Helm Chart repository; they are able to work independently from the other Collector repositories and have been able to create an independent community.

We also have a growing backlog of issues related to the release process that would benefit from a dedicated set of people.

Overview

I propose we create a new collector-releases-approvers Github team that are approvers on the opentelemetry-collector-releases repository and code owners for the Builder and release workflows. The existing approvers teams will focus on the Collector and Collector components codebases. This opens future possibilities for creating a separate WG/SIG for this and further improving our release process.

Team scope and responsibilities

The collector-releases-approvers team will be approvers for the opentelemetry-collector-releases repository. They will also be listed as code owners for the release workflows on the opentelemetry-collector and opentelemetry-collector-contrib repositories.

The new team will not acquire any responsibilities related to the release; there will be no changes in the release rotation or release duties after this change.

Initial team members

Initially, all members of the collector-contrib-approvers team will be part of the collector-releases-approvers team. The Collector maintainers will reach out to existing contributors to the Collector releases to invite them to join the team.

Prior art

This introduces an approver group without a maintainer. It also introduces this team as a code owner for files in other repositories. There are prior instances of both of these patterns within the OpenTelemetry project:

1. There are currently two SIGs that have approver teams without corresponding maintainer teams:

• The Docs SIG has multiple localization approver teams that have approver duties for the translations of the OpenTelemetry documentation.
• The Semantic Conventions SIG has multiple approver teams corresponding to different Working Groups and/or semantic conventions areas.

2. There are multiple instances of teams being code owners:

• opentelemetry-collector approvers are code owners for examples/demo in opentelemetry-collector-contrib
• Helm chart and Operator approvers are code owners for the k8s distro in opentelemetry-collector-releases
• Go instrumentation approvers are code owners of instrgen in opentelemetry-go-contrib

Future work

If we are able to grow a healthy community around the releases repository, in the future we can consider the following:

• Having a dedicated SIG/WG for the opentelemetry-collector-releases repository.
• Making the collector-releases-approvers code owners of the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder.
• Having dedicated meetings for release retros that allow us to iteratively improve the Collector release process.
• Splitting off the artifact and container release process to be independent from the source code release from opentelemetry-collector and opentelemetry-collector-contrib.

This proposal does not require us to do any of the above, but they are interesting possibilities for the future.