Deprecation/End of Support/Archival guidelines

[atoulme]

I am opening this issue in hope of sparking a conversation around the guidelines the OpenTelemetry community may adopt in regards to three separate concepts:

• Deprecation
  Deprecation is already used throughout OpenTelemetry, the collector repository defines deprecation under its own docs here: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/blob/main/docs/component-stability.md#deprecated

The component is planned to be removed in a future version and no further support will be provided. Note that new issues will likely not be worked on. When a component enters "deprecated" mode, it is expected to exist for at least two minor releases. See the component's readme file for more details on when a component will cease to exist.

I believe this behavior is OK.

• End of Support
  We currently do not provide guidance for support expectations around component versions. We ask users to provide the collector version in bug reports. In effect, we often ask users to try to reproduce with the latest version when they make a bug report.

I think it would make sense for us to define a cut off by which we cannot accept a bug report, such as that the version of the component is older than a year.

• Archival
  We currently allow downloads of any binaries offered by the project for any version. Ubuntu or the Apache Software Foundation take a stance to archive binaries after a period of time to a separate download site.

I believe artifacts older than a certain period of time should move to an archives site to make it clear those downloads are no longer supported, and kept for historical purposes, rather than production downloads.

[austinlparker]

We have a pretty thorough list of guidance in https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/versioning-and-stability/, but I'm not entirely sure we have a definition of archival. Could you clarify if what you're suggesting here is additive to our existing guidelines, or if they apply to something that the specification guidelines do not cover (e.g., agents or other non-specified binaries/components distributed by the project)

[atoulme]

I believe the guidelines you mention cover well deprecation, but do not cover end of support and archival, and I see both as additive to the current guidance.