[Go] Conflicting proto file names (not path) cannot be used in Go ?

[Jan Pfeifer]

hi all,

Today I bumped into the conflicting file name registration runtime error below.

```

panic: proto: file "sentencepiece_model.proto" is already registered previously from: "github.com/eliben/go-sentencepiece/internal/model" currently from: "github.com/gomlx/go-huggingface/tokenizers/sentencepiece/private/protos" See https://protobuf.dev/reference/go/faq#namespace-conflict 

```

The two libraries I'm using define the protos under different proto `package` names, as well as different `option go_package` paths -- so in principle, I understand, the protos they define should be unrelated and have no conflict.

For the record, `syntax = "proto2"` is defined in both proto files.

Just the last part of the file name ("sentencepiece_model.proto") are the same, they are in different paths.

I own one of these libraries, so I could change the file name to something like:

"sentencepiece_model_<unique_hash>.proto"

And that works as expected -- but it is a sad solution :).

Am I misunderstanding the error ? Any suggestions on how to prevent such conflicts ? 

Many thanks in advance.

[Em Rauch]

I believe the issue is more inherent to protobuf in general and not a Go specific thing; basically if you have a file that does `import "x.proto"` that needs to be able to be resolved uniquely. Note that it should not require the _file names_ themselves to be globally unique, the problem arises when you invoke protoc with something like this:

protoc -Iproject1 project1/foo.proto
protoc -Iproject2 project2/foo.proto

Which results in the two files being represented as their (necessarily globally unique name) of just "foo.proto". 

If you instead invoke proto without the -I, there would be no conflict (because the two files will have their canonical file names as "project1/foo.proto" and "project2/foo.proto"):

protoc project1/foo.proto
protoc project2/foo.proto

You may find more discussion about this (including some details which are Go specific) here: https://github.com/golang/protobuf/issues/1122

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[Jan Pfeifer]

So this seems to be another one of those artifacts of Google's mono-repo (Bazel) view of the world -- where each file is used with the full path and uniquely identify it. 

Thanks for the link to the issue: this is a 4 years old issue, with dozen of followers.

For the record, and anyone ending in this thread: the long story (in the issue) short: there is no clean solution, and proto maintainers are not likely to solve it (my understanding from reading the issue in github)

I proposed a relatively simple work around by wrapping protoc with a script that uses the go import path (of the package in the current directory) as a unique key along the file name, which seems the correct result to achieve for a global unique name: see https://github.com/golang/protobuf/issues/1122#issuecomment-2518289653

Thanks Em, the pointers are very appreciated.

Jan