Readme says proto files are published to registries, but can't find npm package

[jsumners-nr]

opentelemetry-proto/README.md

Line 12 in 68f9c63

The compiled files are published to central repositories (Maven, ...) from OpenTelemetry client libraries.

That statement indicates that the proto files should be available in a package on npmjs.com. But #379 (comment) simply states "they don't exist" and the issue was closed.

I need access to the schema files for testing, and having to copy them out of this repo is quite cumbersome.

[dmathieu]

Each SDK uses this repository in their own way. Go has a published module for example.

In the case of javascript, the JS SDK has this package which holds a submodule into this repository used to build the proto code.

So no, there is no public package published to NPM with the compiled OTLP into JS.
But using a similar approach to what this otlp-transformer package is doing should be relatively straightforward.

[jsumners-nr]

I am saying that the readme clearly states this module should be available in the common package repositories, and that it is not available at npmjs.com. The resolution should be a package published to npmjs.com.

[dmathieu]

Or the README should be reworded.

[jsumners-nr]

I disagree. These schemas are necessary for anyone needing to validate that OTLP messages are generated as expected. As it is right now, they have to be manually copied from this repository into any project needing to use them.

[pichlermarc]

I disagree. These schemas are necessary for anyone needing to validate that OTLP messages are generated as expected. As it is right now, they have to be manually copied from this repository into any project needing to use them.

My personal opinion: generating code from protobuf files is by far the most common and idiomatic approach for protobuf that I've seen. It's also fairly simple to do in any language I've ever used in my professional life (C++, C#, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python). Generated code for de-serializing OTLP requests is also very unlikely to match the performance requirements for server-side use, which means that hand-rolled implementations are very common in non-trivial use-cases (speaking from experience working on OTLP ingest endpoints at Dynatrace).

As a Maintainer in the JavaScript SIG: that's the reason why we don't supply a package that deserializes requests in OTel JS - it's simply unlikely to be useful for any but the most trivial cases and adds a massive API surface that needs to be maintained. However the @opentelemetry/otlp-transformer package does offer ways to serialize requests from the OTel JS SDK's internal data model to OTLP and ways to deserialize responses which is all that's needed for a client library like OTel JS.

For E2E testing in OTel JS where we need to deserialize, we simply use an OTel collector in the loop and read the output provided via the OTel Collector's file exporter, as the OTel collector is the closest to a reference endpoint that we could get.

[jsumners-nr]

Sorry, I don't understand how that addresses the issue. As I stated, in order to accomplish the task I wanted to accomplish, I had to manually copy the proto files into my project and load them like so:

https://github.com/jsumners-nr/node-newrelic/blob/8042f995cac1f235cf5f6ea5b11bac6c8131be20/test/integration/otel/metrics.test.js#L75-L79

As this own project's readme suggests, it would be far easier if we could install an ecosystem native package in order to access these schemas.