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Description
Our dependency on betterproto
is a source of a few issues:
- We currently depend on the
2.x
series, which is only in beta (currently2.0.0b6
). This is both non-ideal and is incompatible with some Python installers, most notablyuv
: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/blob/main/PIP_COMPATIBILITY.md#pre-release-compatibility betterproto
's handling of theStruct
WKT is partially broken. I've tried to fix it, but round-tripping a JSON serialized message through aStruct
is still impossible, which causes all kinds of problems for the (mostly in-toto) definitions that useStruct
- Finally, the models and their APIs themselves aren't particularly Pythonic -- this is more of an issue with protobuf itself than
betterproto
, but results in development friction and impedance mismatches elsewhere that we have to paper over
As such, we should probably remove our dependency on betterproto
in the medium term. There are a few blockers to doing this:
- The
Bundle
, etc. models all come fromprotobuf-specs
, which is currently built on top ofbetterproto
for the Python bindings. - There are (probably) a few places we leak references to
betterproto
-generated models in Sigstore's public APIs
(1) is probably addressable either by re-modeling the relevant parts of protobuf-specs
in pydantic, or by regenerating the Python bindings on top of the JSON Schema for protobuf-specs
. (2) may require a major reversion.
CC @DarkaMaul since he noticed this 🙂