Add prototyping requirement for significant changes #2502
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jsuereth
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Semantic conventions are intended to provide practical guidance for instrumentation authors and clear documentation for end users on what to expect and how to interpret telemetry. Semantic conventions are not a product on their own; they are only useful when adopted by instrumentations.
Based on past experience, it’s not possible to define realistic conventions without first instrumenting a few libraries, components, or technologies.
This is a proposal to require instrumentation implementations or prototypes for substantial changes to semantic conventions regardless of stability level.
While this may seem like a significant change to the documented process, it aligns with current practice. Looking at the changelog, most changes in recent months (or years?) have been driven by new instrumentation development (e.g., CI/CD metrics, CLI spans, GenAI conventions, .NET runtime metrics and connection spans), refactoring of existing instrumentation (e.g., k8s, system conventions), or stabilization efforts (e.g., database), and in most cases were accompanied by an existing instrumentation or prototypes.