Improve contributor workflow

[codeboten]

Currently setting up the development environment for contributors is difficult, error prone and takes a long time. This discussion is aiming to capture ideas for how to make things better.

The workflow should ensure to cover how to set things up for:

• making changes to a single repo (contrib or core)
• making changes that need to be merged to a feature branchj
• making changes that require updates to both core and contrib

[codeboten]

I'll start by suggesting that we should start by using makefiles in this repo to follow a similar workflow to other otel repos.

[Oberon00]

Currently, development mostly works on Windows. It should explicitly be documented what operating systems are supported, both for development and actual usage (though I suppose they will mostly be the same, at least tests would have to run on all environments that using otel-python is supported on).
AFAIK makefiles don't work natively on Windows, so this would mean not supporting Windows.

[owais]

Before getting into technical details and implementation, I'd like to suggest we optimize the dev experience of making changes contained to a single package. A contributor should be able do the following:

git clone [email protected]:open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python-contrib.git

cd instrumentation/opentelemetry-instrumentation-flask

make install  # resolves dependencies but could be smartly integrated into test/lint etc

... make changes to flask package

make test

make lint

git commit && git push

Point being we should be able to work on a single package in isolation and whatever dev tool we pick as the default one (make,tox,nox, etc) should handle creating envs, installing deps, running tests and linter for a single package at a time.

[lzchen]

+1 to this. The experience should be as simple as this.

[TylerHelmuth]

I'd like to open this discussion up again. I'm a new contributor and its not been a great experience getting packages installed or linting working correctly 😢 .

[ocelotl]

@TylerHelmuth what issues have you had with linting?

Opened #2512, its fix may help you.

[TylerHelmuth]

My initial experience with linting was that I could pass liniting locally but not the github workflows. I'll tryout this change and see if it helps

[TylerHelmuth]

@ocelotl this did solve my problem. After performing those commands (and fixing some packages to be M1 compatible), I was able to lint locally and reproduce the pipeline results.

[ocelotl]

Hm, why makefiles? It introduces another language, the same can be achieved with Python if we use nox.