Nice idea. Found more documentation about this capability here: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/feature_variants.html

Its kind of strange. The syntax for instructing gradle to automatically include the dependencies required by the "incubating" feature would look something like:

 implementation("io.opentelemetry:opentelemetry-sdk-trace")) {
     capabilities {
         requireCapability("io.opentelemetry:opentelemetry-sdk-trace-incubating")
     }
 }

With gradle able to resolve the dependencies of the -incubating feature based on contents from the *.module file (e.g. opentelemetry-sdk-trace-1.47.0.module).

Its not a syntax I expect most gradle users would be familiar with, so I wonder if we would be better off telling users to add the required opentelemetry-api-incubator instead of using the requireCapability syntax.

If we go in this direction, here are some other places we would want this:

• :sdk-extensions:jaeger-remote-sampler
• :exporters:common
• :exporters:otlp:all
• :exporters:sender:jdk
• :exporters:sender:okhttp

Seems like it could get complicated quickly.

I wonder if there's any lightweight way to instruct gradle to include the "optional" metadata in pom.xml without leveraging this gradle feature capability.

<scope>compile</scope>
      <optional>true</optional>