Is it possible to relax the Protobuf constraint to >=5.29?

[yilei]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

We have an environment that uses tink-py as well as apache team.

tink 1.12.0 changed the Protobuf constraint from protobuf>=5.29.3 to protobuf>=6.30.2.

Unfortunately Apache Beam sets a protobuf<6.0.0.dev0 constraint so we can't use the latest version of tink and beam in the same Python environment with conflicting version constraints on Protobuf.

What sort of feature would you like to see?

I'd like to ask if it's possible to relax the Protobuf constraint in tink so we could also use Protobuf 5.29?

Have you considered any alternative solutions?

• We could patch tink-py in our environment. AFAIK there isn't a feature in Protobuf 6.x that's required by tink? But I could be totally wrong here.
• I also filed a beam issue at [Feature Request]: Support Protobuf 6.x in Python SDK apache/beam#35432, ideally that could be fixed.

Would you like to add additional context?

Thank you for the consideration!

[juergw]

We upgraded this because we wanted to add support for Python 3.13. Moving back to 5.29 would make things more complicated for us, which we want to avoid. I'm sorry.

I think it would be much better that Apache Beam supports protobuf v6.

[tvalentyn]

I work on Apache Beam. In the past upgrading protobuf version was a significant undertaking for us, particularly since our dependency chain often has protobuf as a dependency, and we have to get other projects support protobuf as well; there were also serious regressions in the past that delayed the upgrades.

I am not sure what complexites are involved in maintaining support of multiple versions of protobuf in tink , but if tink code does not directly depend on particular newer protobuf functionality, consider to keeping the range to all supported versions.