Distribute as librairie/package

[Louis Letourneau]

I can't seem to wrap my head around a way to distribute protobuf generated code.

I have 2 projects, A and B

B imports project As proto definition

A and B have python and C++ generated code.

For python it seems to all work well (had issues with protoc not generating the righ import package path, but I seem to have solved this)

In C++ it get's complicated

Say I build a .so from project A and I bundle the header with the librairy (protobuf 3.17 was used).

If The person working on B had a different version of protobuf installed, he can't use the header or he'll get the 'error: #error This file was generated by an older version of protoc which is' message

So for C++ I can't bundle a library with headers, I need to share the proto and let the users generate the code in their own build system... This seems wrong.

In the same line of thought, should the _pb2.py be disitributed or should the client installing the lib locally generate (say have instructions in setup.py) the code

Thanks

[Deanna Garcia]

In general we recommend that you distribute the .proto file itself and not the generated code. As you pointed out, distributing generated code doesn't allow any user to use a different runtime. The wire format is always compatible so it doesn't matter that you are using a different version of protobuf than your users. This also lets them use your proto in any language, giving them more flexibility. 

[Louis Letourneau]

This is what I ended up doing in the end.
Thanks

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