If we make this change, it should probably be accompanied by moving up various tables up to ScopeProfiles as well since otherwise there would be duplication of the data in those tables.

Also, a question on the API structure: one use case / role that pprof's profile proto plays today is a simple container for a single one-shot data collection. For example, in https://go.dev/blog/pprof the example code looks like

var cpuprofile = flag.String("cpuprofile", "", "write cpu profile to file")

func main() {
    flag.Parse()
    if *cpuprofile != "" {
        f, err := os.Create(*cpuprofile)
        if err != nil {
            log.Fatal(err)
        }
        pprof.StartCPUProfile(f)
        defer pprof.StopCPUProfile()
    }
    ...

and this code writes out the data in the profile proto format, of the message type Profile.

In the current OTel type hierarchy, what type plays a similar role? If tomorrow some language runtime decides to be OTel profiling first, what type would we expect it to produce? Before this change I would say that it's the Profile type. With this change I think it's now ScopeProfiles which is kind of an clumsy name for that purpose.

Curious what others think on this.

Closing this proposal after discussing it in the recent Profiling SIG meeting.