GoGo Protobuf looking for new ownership

[awalterschulze]

I write to you on behalf of the GoGo Protobuf project, which has long been supported by a small group of dedicated developers taking time out of their lives to keep the project up to date and add new features, to the benefit of all users. Unfortunately, the personal circumstances of the maintainers have changed and we are no longer able to keep up with the issues and feature requests that naturally crop up for a popular open source project.

In particular, the recent golang/protobuf release 1.4.x (AKA APIv2: https://blog.golang.org/protobuf-apiv2), has created a big chunk of work required to be compatible with the new world of Go protobufs. While longer term this work will likely make gogo/protobuf much more compatible with the rest of the ecosystem, there is currently no one to take on this piece of work, and users are living in uncertainty around the future of the project.

We are therefore reaching out to industry users such as yourself to ask for help with maintaining the project. Without external help, it is likely that the GoGo Protobuf project will be discontinued. We know there are many organisations out there that use the project, so we're hoping that one or more of them would step up to take on this maintenance.

Please let us know if you are a user that can take on (co)ownership of this project.
It is as simple as commenting on this issue.

Sincerely,

@awalterschulze and @johanbrandhorst

From Walter:

I want to thank @jmarais and @donaldgraham for doing a great job stepping up to take on maintenance of GoGo Protobuf over the past 2 years.
I want to also thank @johanbrandhorst for developing and maintaining the GRPC interoperability.
I am very lucky and proud to call you all my friends.

[alexanderbez]

I would really hate to see this project die and would love to see parity with the new Proto APIv2. I would like to help contribute as much as I can. Do you think before the existing core contributors move on, can create a milestone or set of issues needing to be completed to be compatible with the latest v2 updates?

[tac0turtle]

I share the same sentiment. I would like to contribute and help organize gogoproto. That being said I am unfamiliar with the inner workings of gogoproto and I am a junior developer, but I am willing to learn and work with others to help this project live on.

[johanbrandhorst]

The first task is to identity the current incompatibilities with APIv2. Just a quick look at the issue tracker gives me:

• WKT serialization is broken with golang/protobuf v1.4.0 and gogoproto_import = false #686
• gogo/proto marshalling is failing with latest github.com/golang/protobuf v1.4.0-rc.4 #678

There will probably be more, but it would be good to first get an idea of the exact shortcomings and necessary fixes. Assuming no bigger org steps up to take over, I think the short term goal is 1.4.x compatibility. If ownership can be transferred, there could be talk of a GoGo protobuf APIv2.

[dhiemaz]

Would love to take part of this project
@johanbrandhorst, @awalterschulze

[achille-roussel]

Hello @awalterschulze (and other gogo protobuf maintainers), thanks for opening up this discussion!

Would you be able to give a bit more details on how would this new ownership would be ideally structured?

• Are you trying to find a new home to step down as the leaders of this project?
• Are you looking to share the responsibility with a new group of maintainers?
• Would the current maintainers be interested in a sponsorship to spend some focus time on gogo protobuf?

[awalterschulze]

Thank you.
These are great questions.

Are you trying to find a new home to step down as the leaders of this project?

Yes and ideally a new home, where the employer(s) or team(s) acknowledges and gives those employee(s) at least some time to work on the project.

Are you looking to share the responsibility with a new group of maintainers?

No. All our circumstances have changed so much that this won't be possible.

Would the current maintainers be interested in a sponsorship to spend some focus time on gogo protobuf?

I know this is a No for me and Johan and highly probably a no for Donald and Jacques.

[ydnar]

We recently did some work to port a project from GoGo Protobuf to the v2 API. Aside from gogoproto.nullable (which we use quite a bit, in particular with WKTs), the blockers we identified were custom names, struct tags, and native well-known types.

Requests for these features are tracked here on the Go Protobuf repo:

• go_name: protoc-gen-go: support go_name option to specify Go identifier golang/protobuf#555
• Struct tags: protoc-gen-go: support go_tag option to specify custom struct tags golang/protobuf#52
• Standard Go types for well-known types: protoc-gen-go: support generating standard Go types in place of well-known-types golang/protobuf#414

The v2 reflection API might make implementing some of these easier than forking the project. If these features are important to you, I’d recommend weighing in on these issues.

[xen0n]

Reporter of #686 here. At work we're heavily reliant on gogo/protobuf for ergonomic gRPC APIs, and rewriting every enum and re-inventing a struct tag injector is not an option.

I tried to do some of the porting at that time, but it seems much of the machinery that the original maintainers used to track upstream is not public stuff (say, committed in this repo). On top of that it's generally hard to justify general open-source maintenance work when the department is under-staffed. We're watching this situation though, and I have just enough experience in compilers to review and debug code. If anyone steps up and decides to do the grunt work, I could probably spend a few weekends to help.