Download URLs for opentelemetry artifacts with scarf.sh

[svrnm]

While many language SDKs are installed via their respective package managers, we have a set of projects that produce artifacts that are downloaded by end-users via GitHub. Some of them are

• OpenTelemetry Collector (core + contrib)
• OpenTelemetry Collector Builder (ocb)
• OpenTelemetry Java Agent
• OpenTelemetry .NET Autoinstrumentation

Right now those artifacts are served via GitHub and end users need to pull them from URLs like

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/releases/download/cmd%2Fbuilder%2Fv0.95.0/ocb_0.95.0_linux_amd64

Those URLs have 2 issues:

• In docs (and probably some other places) this leads to code blocks that are hard to read/require unnecessary line breaks.
• We can not get centralized insights on how often which artifact has been downloaded

As proposed by @austinlparker and discussed in open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io#4079 we would like to give scarf.sh a try, which can turn the URL above into something like

https://get.opentelemetry.io/ocb_0.95.0_linux_amd64

I raise this community issue, because to do so I would need some support from different SIGs:

• @open-telemetry/governance-committee & @open-telemetry/technical-committee to take a look if this is a fit for our community (note that scarf is vetted by LF, see The Linux Foundation is Partnering With Scarf for OSS Usage Analytics
• @open-telemetry/sig-security-maintainers to review scarf and see if there are any security concerns we need to get out of the way (or if there are any blockers)
• @open-telemetry/collector-maintainers, @open-telemetry/java-instrumentation-maintainers, @open-telemetry/dotnet-instrumentation-maintainers to take a look if they are OK with that for their artifacts

I can and will create issues in SIGs repositories as needed.

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Notes:

• Scarf can also be used for docker images, e.g. fluent is using that already: https://docs.fluentbit.io/manual/installation/docker
• For the "shorter urls" we can implement something in the docs repository as well, but this would come without analytics and with a lot more maintanance and setup effort.