OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES values are not parsed as defined per spec

[pellared]

From the OTel spec:

The OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES environment variable will contain of a list of key value pairs, and these are expected to be represented in a format matching to the W3C Baggage, except that additional semi-colon delimited metadata is not supported, i.e.: key1=value1,key2=value2. All attribute values MUST be considered strings.

From the W3C spec:

A value contains a URL encoded UTF-8 string. Leading and trailing whitespaces (OWS) are allowed but MUST be trimmed when converting the header into a data structure.

Currently, the values defined in OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES (splitted by ,) are not parsed at all. Source code here.

Found thanks to: open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go#2963

[lgfa29]

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#2670 updates the Resource spec to take percent-decode into account.

[martinjt]

Is this still the case @pellared ?

[pellared]

The OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES env var is still still not properly parsed.

It accepts keys that should not be allowed.

They values are not precent decoded as noted #3395 (comment)

Reference: https://www.w3.org/TR/baggage/#definition

[github-actions]

This issue was marked stale due to lack of activity and will be closed in 7 days. Commenting will instruct the bot to automatically remove the label. This bot runs once per day.

[github-actions]

Closed as inactive. Feel free to reopen if this issue is still a concern.

[pellared]

@open-telemetry/dotnet-maintainers, I am not sure if auto-closing confirmed issues is a good idea.

[martinjt]

It's pretty common to close stale issues, if we don't plan on fixing this, then I don't see a point in leaving it open personally.

[pellared]

It's pretty common to close stale issues,

There is a difference between an issue when someone is not responsive (and the issue cannot be moved further) from an issue where there was nobody who had to time to fix it.

if we don't plan on fixing this,

Why do you not plan fixing this? Is there any reason why it cannot be fixed?

I don't see a point in leaving it open personally.

Maybe this could have "help wanted" and "good first issue" labels?

[TimothyMothra]

Hi @pellared, I'm sorry this issue got closed.
Your issue was identified as stale on Dec 18, and then closed on Dec 26.
Nothing personal, it's just a coincidence that everyone was on Christmas break during this period and THIS issue slipped through.

We added the stale automation last year because we had hundreds of abandoned issues and we needed a systematic way of combing through these and identifying what to keep open.

You reported that .NET isn't following the spec regarding OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES. I think this should be kept open. I see that Kielek already added this to the Future milestone, which we're using as this repo's backlog. Issues here won't be marked stale again.

Sorry for the confusion and thank you for your contributions.

[Kielek]

@pellared, I doubt that it is candidate do the first contribution. Fos sure, it will be great to have some PRs, marking only as help wanted.