add more methods to ExtendedTracer

[zeitlinger]

The Opentelemetry APIs are rather difficult to use - therefore I've developed the following utility method, which is part of a company internal library - so it has already been tested by some users.

Based on this issue, I'm now creating a PR here.

Not polished yet

• method names
• javadoc

Breaking changes

In addition to adding functionality, the existing functionality is also changed as follows:

• the methods don't throw Exception anymore - this is turned out to be inconvenient to use
• when an exception is caught, the span status is set to error - this is what you usually want

Questions

I'm undecided if it's better to catch (an re-throw) Exception or Throwable - the current implementation is not consistent between run (catches Throwable) and call (catches Exception)

[jkwatson]

Looking at these methods, I would suggest they be put into a contrib module in the opentelemetry-java-contrib repository, rather than here. It's a bit of a hodge-podge of things to assist with manual instrumentation, and not things that we'd want to ever add to the actual Tracer interface.

[zeitlinger]

Looking at these methods, I would suggest they be put into a contrib module in the opentelemetry-java-contrib repository, rather than here. It's a bit of a hodge-podge of things to assist with manual instrumentation, and not things that we'd want to ever add to the actual Tracer interface.

Not sure I understand - these methods are not part of the standard Tracer interface.
Are you saying we should have another ExtendedTracer in a contrib module?

[jkwatson]

No. The goal of ExtendedTracer was to eventually add the methods to the Tracer interface. These methods you are adding don't seem like Tracer methods at all, but just a bunch of instrumentation utility methods.

[zeitlinger]

Closing in favor of open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-contrib#759