Mysterious protobuffers error related to "optional" labels

[RedMarcher]

failed to run protoc: exit status 1: goagen_backend_history.proto:30:18: Explicit 'optional' labels are disallowed in the Proto3 syntax. To define 'optional' fields in Proto3, simply remove the 'optional' label, as fields are 'optional' by default.

The above was generated by goa gen. After much trial and tribulation, I actually managed to fix my API enough that goa gen is finally running. I think the above error is the last issue that needs to be resolved. After searching online, the results I saw said this was caused by explicitly defining something with Optional(). However, I went through my code, and I didn't notice this anywhere. Any theories as to what's causing the problem? I will provide any screenshots or info that's needed to solve this issue.

[douglaswth]

What version of protoc do you have installed? This is likely caused by a fairly old version of protoc (see #3159 which happened in 2022).

[RedMarcher]

/workspaces/Cojekt (main) $ protoc --version
libprotoc 3.6.1

I believe I installed the latest version of protoc, since I installed it using apt, which I'm pretty sure defaults to latest.

[douglaswth]

That's very out of date: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases/tag/v3.6.1 (released in 2018)

The current latest version is: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases/tag/v30.0

[RedMarcher]

Yeah, apparently APT doesn't have the latest version. It's a shame though, it's a real pain in the ass to have to install software manually onto a codespace. I ended up having to download the source of the latest release and compiling it.

[RedMarcher]

I just wanted to check in to see if there are any updates to this. Like I said, if there's any information you need to know about my project files, configs, etc, just ask. I have no idea what's causing this error, although it doesn't seem to block off running the gen command.

[raphael]

I think the version of protoc needs to be updated, here is mine:

protoc --version
libprotoc 29.3

[RedMarcher]

Yeah, I realize now too that the version provided by apt is way outdated.

[RedMarcher]

So, for some reason codespaces constantly generates errors when trying to install protobuffers. Is there any sort of precompiled binaries that are available? I am really struggling to install protobufs without the use of a distribution manager.

[raphael]

You should be able to grab the latest version from the GitHub releases.

[RedMarcher]

Alright, I managed to finally install the correct version. For anyone in the future who sees this, these are the exact steps I took:

As raphael helpfully pointed out, they do in fact have pre-compiled binaries available. For github codespaces, you specifically want the

[protoc-30.0-linux-x86_64.zip]

version found at

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases/download/v30.0/protoc-30.0-linux-x86_64.zip

This was the latest version when I encountered this issue. Perhaps when you encounter this, there will be a more updated version. When you download it, run these commands to copy the bin and include folder to the correct path after extracting from the zip.

sudo cp bin/protoc /usr/local/bin/
sudo cp -r include /usr/local/include/
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/protoc
protoc --version

Now it should say the correct version. I had issues with the apt version, so you need to download it from the website. Thanks to everyone for helping me fix this problem.