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Battery request - Google Protocol Buffers

Have you fellows looked at including the Google Protocol Buffers API in the standard offering? It's a pain to install as a user as it assumes root privilege and requires a compiler for the supporting binaries. Any chance this could be added to the wish list?

I'll raise a ticket for that. In the meantime, though, there is a Python protocol buffer compiler called pyprotobuf that installs cleanly and quickly on PythonAnywhere. I don't know enough about protocol buffers to know how well it works, though. Perhaps you can give it a go and see whether it works for you.

Many thanks. In fact, it isn't the compiling of the protocol buffer .proto file itself that's the problem (which is what pyprotobuf can do) - I can do that on any computer and copy it over since the "compiler" output is just a .py file. The issue is the lack of supporting libraries that the outputted .py depends on: the whole google.protobuf suite, etc. The installer just doesn't seem to be able to be easily configured to install those libraries in a local directory without first compiling the .proto compiler binary using GCC.

Right-o. We'll add it to the list of things to do, next time we rebuild a server image. It may be a few weeks before we next do one though...