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Discussion: Regression and Process Improvements (Ref: PR #389) #441
Description
Hi team,
I'm opening this issue to discuss a recent regression that impacted clients (like google-cloud-spanner) and to explore how we can improve our processes to prevent similar breaking changes in the future.
Context
The Change: PR #389 ("Cleanup the resource detector code a bit") was merged, which refactored the GoogleCloudResourceDetector and deprecated the old one.
The Bug: This refactor appears to have introduced a TypeError. The new resource detector's code was attempting to access attributes on an OpenTelemetry Resource object using dictionary-style access (e.g., resource['key']) instead of the correct attribute-style access (e.g., resource.attributes['key']).
The Impact: This regression introduced a runtime TypeError that broke downstream clients. For example, here are the google-cloud-spanner library reported failures: https://github.com/googleapis/python-spanner/issues.
The Fix: A subsequent PR was merged (fix PR) that correctly changed the access pattern back to resource.attributes['key'], resolving the TypeError.
Activity
aabmass commentedon Oct 31, 2025
@DylanRussell
DylanRussell commentedon Oct 31, 2025
Neither the old or new resource detector supports that dictionary bracket kind of access.. maybe the new detector is correctly typed and the old one wasn't and it correctly uncovered a bug in the code? I'm confused
DylanRussell commentedon Oct 31, 2025
Both old and new code were correctly annotated as returning a Resource though
aabmass commentedon Nov 5, 2025
@sinhasubham can you link an actual issue? Looking at your PR I'm also confused why the change was necessary