Painful Python GAE (managed VM), Protobuf interaction

[Adrian Wan]

I'd like to call attention to this protobuf bug, which has an interaction with GAE. 

A brief summary for those not familiar with this interaction: in Python, GAE expects to be able to import its libraries with 

from google.appengine.ext import ...

However, protobuf also installs to a google namespace:

from google.protobuf import ...

And the problem is that these two do not install to the same namespace. 

I wonder if there's anything that needs to / can be done from the GAE side to complement this problem of installing to a shared namespace. The help of a Python developer with experience in package & installs would be much appreciated. 

[Jon Parrott]

We can make the SDK's google package a namespace package relatively easily.