The idea behind it is described in detail in
https://github.com/prometheus/client_golang/issues/320 .
This commit also updates the example given in
promhttp/instrument_server_test.go , which nicely illustrates the
benefit of this change.
So far, currying could be emulated by creating different metric vec's
with different values in their ConstLabels. This was quite difficult
to grasp - which is essentially what was done in the example mentioned
above. Now that this use case can be solved without ConstLabels, we
can safely declare ConstLabels as rarely used. (Perhaps we can
deprecate them entirely one day, but I'll take a raincheck on that
when the changes of v0.10 have materialized.) This commit thus also
updates the ConstLabel doc comments in the various Opts. (It contained
fairly outdated stuff anyway.)
The "panic in case of error" code was so far in metricVec. This pulls
it up into the exported types like CounterVec. This is code
replication, but it avoids an explicit type conversion. Mostly,
however, this is preparation to make the wrapped metricVec an
interface (required for curried vec's).
When those are published on Dockerhub, people will be able to start those
examples in fewer steps than the current documentation:
https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/getting_started/#starting-up-some-sample-targets
While relying on Docker may not be always wished, giving the possibility to
quickly start a daemon that exposes metrics can be useful in many tutorials.
The simple and random example are build as static binaries and packaged as
single binaries in Docker images.
This commit tries really hard to limit the number of per-example maintenance
work by sharing most of the Makefile to build the Docker images. The tiny top
level Makefiles in each example directory are strictly identical.
Updates: #347
MetricVec is un-experted by now. godoc handles that correctly by
showing the methods of the embedded un-exported metricVec with the
exported type (CounterVec, SummaryVec, ...) that embeds metricVec.
This is in preparation for "curried" metric vecs, as discussed.
And it's a good thing anyway. The exported MetricVec was from a time
when I thought people would define own Metric types and then create
Vecs of it. That has never happened.
beorn7