Should examples exist in this repo?

[codeboten]

I'm wondering with all the changes to centralize documentation in the OpenTelemetry website if the examples directory still makes sense to keep in this repo.

[jpkrohling]

We discussed documentation during the leadership summit last week, and we think it's best to keep documentation (and examples) close to their owners (individual SIGs), and work with the Communications SIG on something like "metadata.yaml" for those examples, which can be consumed by the website automatically.

cc @svrnm

[svrnm]

Thanks for raising this @codeboten and to confirm what @jpkrohling said: we need to find a balance between centralization and de-centralization. What we do right now for Docs served us well but we are already facing some challenges and consider changing that with tooling to extract code from other repos (see open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io#1635).
I promised during the summit last week to write down some of what we think we should do in the future as a foundation for a larger discussion, but I didn't get to that yet, KCD Munich got in my way. It's high on my priority list:-)

cc @open-telemetry/docs-approvers

[codeboten]

@jpkrohling right I guess I was looking at these examples and its unclear to me whether even in this repository (and in collector-contrib) they're useful to end users. Some questions:

• are they being executed to ensure they work with every version of the collector?
• are they providing examples the website documentation doesn't but should?
• the readme sends readers to the website but there's no information from that docs page on when they should come back to this examples directory. Should this be changed or at least mentioned in the docs?

[svrnm]

Ah, I should have checked the folder content first, it looks like those examples previously were used by docs but I think they aren't anymore? Maybe some of the updated docs can be copied (and later sourced) from there?