Remove dependency to all exporters in SDK

[Flarna]

Followup on #4145

I think we should remove the dependency to all exporters from SDK similar as it was done for Jaeger in #4049.

The OTLP exporters include quite some transitive dependencies like grpc which are often not needed. This results in unneeded long installation time, unneeded high disc size/bundle size.
There might be more like longer startup time, higher memory consumption just because unneeded stuff is read and code is held in memory.

[pichlermarc]

Agreed. I think we should also first provide a heads-up notice one release prior, as was done in #4068

[dyladan]

How would the environment variables then work? Do we make these exporters optional peer dependencies?

[pichlermarc]

How would the environment variables then work? Do we make these exporters optional peer dependencies?

with the Jaeger exporter, we currently lazy-require it. we could do something similar with the otlp exporters. IIRC npm 7+ installs optional peer dependencies by default when installing the package, so that might not be an option.

[Flarna]

if someone sets an env var to use foo exporter which is not installed it will fail.
If someone would like to switch without changes in package.json between x exporters all of the need be installed.
But why should we force people to install a lot exporters (including 3rd party deps like grpc) if they never intend to use it?

I assume config via env should be anyway that generic that it works with any exporter, not just a limited list of predefined ones.

[github-actions]

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[pichlermarc]

I'm removing up-for-grabs because we have to do some wider considerations about how we want to deal with these things in the future, not only related to exporters but also instrumentations, but also resource detectors and propagators.