Well one thing is, there are package updates that could masquerade a backdoor much like XZ Utils[1].
The post in question points to dependency package managers however not system packages, such as NPM, which has pre and post build scripts, install scripts, etc.
Not sure but I believe it’s possible you may have read the parent comment unintentionally in the inverse? I might be wrong but I believe you posited their desired focus is to manage people from parent comment, but I actually think it’s opposite. They don’t want to manage people (especially career wise), instead they want to manage and guide the work of teams and people across one or many teams.
My interpretation of it was to pursue the type of work and things you focus on as an Engineering Manager in terms of getting the most of out teams for the goals of the organization but doing so without the need to manage people directly. Which I would agree is nice since it’s really hard to wear the technical hat and also directly manage people, so separation of concerns makes for far less context switching and folks to naturally align doing the part of the job that they do best. I also agree with this definition since it’s how I think of it too.
I am surprised there is no gauge update API yet (instead of callback only), this is a common use case and I don't think folks should be expected to implement their own. Especially since it will lead to potentially allocation heavy bespoke implementations, depending on use case given mutex+callback+other structures that likely need to be heap allocated (vs a simple int64 wrapper with atomic update/load APIs).
Also I would just say that the fact the APIs differ a lot to more common popular Prometheus client libraries does beg the question of do we need more complicated APIs that folks have a harder time using. Now is the time to modernize these before everyone is instrumented with some generation of a client library that would need to change/evolve. The whole idea of an OTel SDK is instrument once and then avoid needing to re-instrument again when making changes to your observability pipeline and where it's pointed. This becomes a hard sell if OTel SDK needs to shift fairly significantly to support more popular & common use cases with more typical APIs and by doing so leaves a whole bunch of OTel instrumented code that needs to be modernized to a different looking API.
> Moreover, we encountered some rough edges in the metrics-related functionality of the Go SDK referenced above. Ultimately, we had to write a conversion layer on top of the OTel metrics API that allowed for simple, Prometheus-like counters, gauges, and histograms.
Have encountered this a lot from teams attempting to use the metrics SDK.
Are you open to comment on specifics here and also what kind of shim you had to put in front of the SDK? It would be great to continue to retrieve feedback so that we can as a community have a good idea of what remains before it's possible to use the SDK for real world production use cases in anger. Just wiring up the setup in your app used to be fairly painful but that has gotten somewhat better over the last 12-24 months, I'd love to also hear what is currently causing compatibility issues w/ the metric types themselves using the SDK which requires a shim and what the shim is doing to achieve compatibility.
The post in question points to dependency package managers however not system packages, such as NPM, which has pre and post build scripts, install scripts, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor