Proto enum growing reserved list

[Agnivah Poddar]

Hi all,

I am designing a new framework for my team wherein I introduce a new Proto message that is uniquely identified by a proto enum value. 

message FooId {

  enum Id {

   ...

  }

}

message Foo {

  optional FooId.Id = 1;

  ...

}

The configs are supposed to be short-lived. The way this is intended to be used is that a client can grab a new enum value and use that in their configuration. Afterwards, they can clean up the config and mark the enum value as reserved. One concern I have is that over time, the list of reserved values will grow too large along with the new enum values making it wasteful(?). Is there a different approach I can take here for my use-case? 

Thanks,

[Jerry Berg]

If the ID's are short lived, you might find string IDs to be better suited. How are the configs being defined, TextFormat? Or some other way?