New tool: grater

[mx-psi]

Note

This issue relates to an LFX mentorship proposal for Term 01 - 2026 March - May, see cncf/mentoring/pull/1594

Overview

Maintenance of a stable Go library often involves value-judgement calls regarding what changes can impact downstream consumers. While some existing tooling like apidiff can go some way towards preventing breakage, these tools work purely in terms of API-level breakage such as changing the type of a symbol. Inspired by tooling in other language ecosystems such as Rust this proposal sets out to build a tool that can give statistical information about the impact of any change on downstream consumers by running the build pipelines and test suites of dependents before and after a particular change.

Once a minimum tool is available, the initial goal is to evaluate using this tool in the OpenTelemetry Collector and OpenTelemetry Go CI, starting just with the internal dependencies between each repository and its 'contrib' counterpart.

Tool design

The tool will have three subcommands:

1. A subcommand for gathering the list of dependents of a module (by using e.g. pkg.go.dev, x/pkgsite: implement HTTP/MCP API for pkg.go.dev golang/go#76718 if available, index.golang.org or https://docs.deps.dev/api/v3alpha/#getdependents)
2. A subcommand for securely running the test suite of a list of dependents of a module and generating an artifact describing the results
3. A subcommand for comparing the results of two test suites and providing a statistical summary

[mahil-2040]

Hii @mx-psi

I am Mahil Patel

I am interested in contributing in this Project for LFX term 1, are there any pre-requisites and guidelines to follow for working on this.
Also can you suggest any open issues so that I can start working on them and get familiar with the codebase?

[sonalgaud12]

Hey @mahil-2040 , you can pick up good first/ help wanted issues. For guidelines you can refer to the contributing guide.

[ishaanxgupta]

hi @mx-psi @dmathieu I was interested for lfx'26 term 1 mentorship. before submitting the proposal on lfx website, is there any requirement that PRs have to be merged/open in open-telemetry? Is there any coding assignment that should be completed before?

[mahil-2040]

@sonalgaud12 Thanks for your reply. However, it looks like PRs have already been raised for all the help wanted and good first issues in this repo.

[sonalgaud12]

There are multiple repository under OpenTelemetry, you can check that! @mahil-2040

[pradhyum6144]

Hi @mx-psi @sonalgaud12

I'm interested in contributing to the "grater" tool as part of the LFX mentorship program for Term 01 2026.
I've explored the opentelemetry-go-build-tools codebase and understand. now i will start contributing to open-telemetry.

Thank you.

[itssaharsh]

Hi @mx-psi @dmathieu
I am a contributer to opentelemtry and I am interested in the lfx mentorship program.
I have seen and contributed to the code base, what would you suggest I do now for this program?

[mx-psi]

Hi all, as you may already know, the dates for the mentorship program are as follows:

• Mentee Applications Open: Monday, January 26 – Tuesday, February 10, 2026, 11AM PST (19:00 UTC)
• Application Review Period: Wednesday, February 11 – Tuesday, February 24, 2026, 11AM PST (19:00 UTC)

[atharvamhaske]

@mx-psi where can i discuss my approach and thought process for this? also are we having any coming community call?