IdeaSift

Protobuf teams patch generated imports and rename schemas to avoid collisions

Protobuf teams, especially Python developers in multi-service repositories, cannot always map generated files and imports to the package names their build and runtime expect. Generated Python code may contain incorrect or invalid import paths, including paths with reserved keywords, while duplicate proto filenames can collide in Go or Python registries. Developers compensate by renaming schema files, forking or renaming packages, or rewriting generated files with shell scripts—brittle steps outside the normal code-generation flow.

For teams generating Protobuf code in Python and Go. Mentioned from Jan 2020 to Sep 2024 on GitHub and Hacker News.

6 different people described this problem in 2 separate discussions.

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0 mentions in the last 12 weeks
Indie fit
6.0/10
Pain
6.7/10
Frequency
7.0/10
Willingness to pay
0.0/10
Momentum
5.0/10
Who pays
Businesses
Competition
Medium
Build difficulty
Medium

What people said

Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.

  1. This is a major pain in the ass both in Go and Python and basically forces you to ensure than no 2 services have the same file called "api/users/service.proto". There have been multiple instances where we literally had to rename a proto file to something like reponame_service.proto to avoid this limitation
  2. I'm seeing it break down with other tools, i.e. bazel, and am having to fork and rename packages
    daicoden on GitHub (protocolbuffers/protobuf)Jun 2021Asked for a toolHas a workaround
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