pmconne
commented
1 year ago Do we know what other internal/alpha APIs appui is using? If we can't remove any such API without causing a breaking change for them, we need a list, and we probably should add prominent documentation to those APIs so we don't accidentally remove them.
I thought I recalled when the appui repo was created they ran the no-internal lint rule and addressed all the problems. Our API policies are a two-way street - you don't get the stability guarantees if you don't follow the usage rules.
calebmshafer
Completely remove the
@itwin/core-telemetrypackage and theIModelHost.telemetryandIModelApp.telemetryAPIs.Background
The Telemetry APIs exposed have been used for feature tracking and not any of the other types of telemetry. We mostly use our
Loggerclasses and, as of 4.0, are starting to introduceOpenTelemetryfor the other types of telemetry (such as trace events). Therefore it never caught on for broader use outside of feature tracking.Feature tracking, in general, is an application-level concept as many assumptions need to be made on what is important for your application to track, where to track it and how to identify/distinguish the different features you will be tracking.
During the iTwin.js 3.0 release, we removed a lot of the assumptions in our telemetry APIs by removing any indication of where to track it (for example Application Insights and Bentley internal feature tracking) but did not go all the way to removing the full use of it. However, we did take a small step and mark the APIs in
@itwin/core-telemetryas alpha and marked the use inIModelHostandIModelAppas internal to discourage usage until we decided what to do.The usage of the API persisted into iTwin.js 4.0 release mostly as a feature tracking API, specifically a few AppUI cases (removed https://github.com/iTwin/appui/pull/397) and when an iModel was opened (removed https://github.com/iTwin/itwinjs-core/pull/5721). Early in the 4.x releases we removed the rest of the usage of the API but did not remove it due to the breaking changes it would cause despite them being
internal/alphaAPIs at the time.Path forward
With the stance that feature tracking is an application-level concept, we will remove the current usage of the Telemetry APIs in all libraries with the anticipation of removal in 5.0.
As for the recommendation to applications building on iTwin.js, the libraries should be raising events for all cases where the applications would like to be notified of something happening. If there is not a notification today, we should determine the best way to raise one for their consumption. Please file an issue requesting such an event or notification.