Description
Background
(take this explanation with a grain of salt; I would not call myself an expert on protobuf and generated code)
You can see the problem here: https://github.com/authzed/authzed-java/blob/main/examples/v1/App.java#L10-L25
This is apparently related to an old behavior of protoc
where you could only have a single top-level proto def in a file because you can only have a single top-level class def in a java file. The solution to this was to have protoc
generate a wrapper class to bundle up the various definitions in a proto file, which produces the FooOuterClass
definitions in the generated Java code.
This ends up being confusing to a user of the library, because whether you need to use FooService
or FooServiceOuterClass
is entirely down to how many things are defined in the source proto file, which isn't visible to a user of the library without diving into either the jar definition or the proto files.
Proposed fix
Using java_multiple_files
in the proto definition as an option should fix this and make the produced code less janky.
Caveat
This will be a breaking change to authzed-java
, because all code that referenced FooServiceOuterClass
will need to now reference FooService
(or something like that).