Better place for the release artifacts

[jpkrohling]

Pretty much every release, folks join the Slack channel looking for the binaries/container images for the latest release. Some complain that they can't find them in the usual place anymore (core/contrib repos), only to be directed to the releases repository. I had a lame attempt of addressing this by changing the release's description for those repositories to link to the releases one, but that didn't solve the problem.

I would like to gather ideas on how to solve this problem. Our users deserve to be able to find the released artifacts without having to know about the releases repo, but how can we do it?

1. Perhaps the release action in the releases repo should be able to upload artifacts to the core and contrib repositories?
2. Or we should keep a table with the most popular artifacts as part of the readme, and updated at every release by the release script?
3. Something else?

[mx-psi]

I think

keep a table with the most popular artifacts as part of the readme, and updated at every release by the release script

together with a link on each release to the corresponding opentelemetry-collector-releases repository release makes a lot of sense.

[bogdandrutu]

What about we don’t have a release repo and we do releases from Core and Contrib repos?

[jpkrohling]

The core distribution depends on components from contrib. So, the option is really only about having the artifacts being generated as part of the contrib release process. The original idea for the -releases is to make it easier to break and decentralize contrib in the future, but if we can make the current process better by joining -releases into -contrib, I'm open to considering it.