Automatically update tool versions

[swiatekm]

Describe the issue you're reporting

Our tool versions are pinned in the Makefile, and we don't have any process for updating them. Ideally this should happen the same way as all other dependencies. Same thing goes for the Golang version we use to build our binaries - it's currently pinned to an arbitrary version in the GHA workflow.

My proposal would be to use renovate for this. It's already used elsewhere in otel - notably the collector contrib repo uses it for dependency management, and it is capable of updating versions embedded in arbitrary files.

I successfully achieved this in my fork. With the following configuration:

• golangci-lint update: Update tool github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint to v1.62.0 swiatekm/opentelemetry-operator#68
• CI Go version update: Update go version in CI to v1.23.3 swiatekm/opentelemetry-operator#54

[jaronoff97]

I would love to add in renovate here and it would be great to use renovate for more than just this too. Given the collector uses it for dependency management, i think we should too.

[secustor]

I'm all for it, but I'm biased as I'm a maintainer there. 😅

Happy to help out here, even if I had not really much time to help with other topics.

[jaronoff97]

@secustor if you could help out that would be great :D

[secustor]

Maybe something to consider in this context would be to sync other reference like the autoinstrumentation versions in versions.txt too.

[swiatekm]

The situation with versions.txt is a bit more complicated, because that file is a manifest of the defaults used by the operator, and isn't always in sync with the latest instrumentation images. I would like to automate instrumentation library upgrades in the images themselves, and for some of them this is already true, but I'm not fully comfortable doing that without having SDK maintainers as code owners for them.

[secustor]

If auto merging is not enabled which is the default, you would still have to merge the auto instrumentation PRs manually.

[swiatekm]

Consensus from the SIG meeting on 05.12.2024 is that we should do this.