GoReleaser: publish Homebrew formula to a Tap on each new release

[edigaryev]

Currently installing OpenTelemetry Collector on macOS is pretty painful compared to Grafana Agent, see open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector#7891.

However, publishing a formula to a Homebrew/homebrew-core can be intimidating both for the maintainers and consumers:

• maintainers: need a tooling to automatically publish new versions (Grafana has a bot for this) or resort to manual work
• consumers: need to build from source, which takes a lot of time and CPU resources on target machines

A simpler, self-managed and readily available alternative is a Homebrew Tap.

Since OpenTelemetry already uses GoReleaser, and GoReleaser has a Homebrew Taps module, publishing a Tap becomes a no-brainer (see PR diff for a minimally working implementation).

Installing from a Tap is as simple as:

brew install open-telemetry/tap/otelcol-contrib

Requires open-telemetry/homebrew-tap repository to be created and accessible via GITHUB_TOKEN.

Cc: @svrnm, @jpeach

[svrnm]

hey @edigaryev, thanks for creating this PR and bumping the discussion around the collector in homebrew.

consumers: need to build from source, which takes a lot of time and CPU resources on target machines

With what is called bottles in the homebrew ecosystem this is not the case anymore, those are binary packages, and "Bottles for homebrew/core formulae are created by Brew Test Bot when a pull request is submitted. If the formula builds successfully on each supported platform and a maintainer approves the change, Brew Test Bot updates its bottle do block and uploads each bottle to GitHub Packages." (see https://docs.brew.sh/Bottles#creation)

maintainers: need a tooling to automatically publish new versions (Homebrew/homebrew-core#155035 for this) or resort to manual work
A simpler, self-managed and readily available alternative is a Homebrew Tap.

As I have outlined in my comment my personal preference would be a formulae on homebrew/core, because of discoverability and user expectations, but it's up to the collector maintainers to decide what they think is easier to maintain.

As a final note, I also like to re-iterate on the following:

nobody can be stopped from providing formulae for opentelemetry artifacts to core, e.g. there is one for opentelemetry-cpp already

The initial provider of that formulae (@flier), who initially pushed opentelemetry-cpp is not a maintainer/regular contributor to the opentelemetry-cpp project, so in the same sense anyone can go ahead and create an initial formulae, and from there a bot is nice, but not necessary for future updates, as the history of that formulae shows: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commits/8fe83e930ae16f5559f9d99441e07e8ceea7d404/Formula/o/opentelemetry-cpp.rb

cc @open-telemetry/cpp-approvers please correct me if I am wrong about this package not coming from any member of your SIG?

[edigaryev]

@svrnm thanks for the input!

I've just realized that this project produces the binaries with CGO_ENABLED=0, which means that hostmetricsreceiver won't emit CPU and disk metrics on macOS, which is in turn a breaker for us.

I went ahead and submitted a PR with a Homebrew formula (inspired by yours one) upstream: Homebrew/homebrew-core#160730, so closing this one.

[edigaryev]

Re-opening because it's not possible to upstream the OpenTelemetry Collector into the Homebrew Core, see open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector#7891 (comment)

[atoulme]

Please help resolve conflicts?

[edigaryev]

Please help resolve conflicts?

Done in b4cfdb9 👌

[atoulme]

Please see the CI

[edigaryev]

Please see the CI

Moved the "brews:"-related GoReleaser configuration generation to the Golang codebase in 3b48905.

[TylerHelmuth]

Should the k8s distro have a formula?

[svrnm]

Note that going down the road of having our own tap requires a dedicated repository:

Requires open-telemetry/homebrew-tap repository to be created and accessible via GITHUB_TOKEN.

[edigaryev]

Should the k8s distro have a formula?

It seems to be Linux-only (which makes sense):

opentelemetry-collector-releases/distributions/otelcol-k8s/.goreleaser.yaml

Lines 8 to 9 in b46b435

	goos:
	- linux