benifits of grpc and protobuf

[ftrotter]

Its been a long time since I installed something that needed me to compile a c program...

and one that failed, btw because you have an undocumented dependancy on libz.. so I needed

sudo apt-get install libz-dev

But even more relevant, you do not actually say what the benifit of installing these things is in your documentation. I am going to real disappointed that I am having custom compiled php extensions to my installation because Google wants to push its favorite tech... and I get no benifit.

So "why?" and "when do you benefit? and when do you not?" should be added to the section that recommends installing these.

-FT

[dwsupplee]

Thanks for the issue @ftrotter. Was it an installation of google/cloud that required libz, or one of our sub-packages such as google/cloud-spanner? That sounds like something we need to take care of, and is not intended. We have been making a strong effort to make sure the library can be used in the most baseline of PHP installs with as few extra dependencies as necessary.

I believe the only two clients which require gRPC at the moment are the handwritten Firestore and Spanner clients as they rely on streaming methods which are currently only available over HTTP/2 through gRPC. For everything else you should be able to stick to using REST and not concern yourself with the C extensions.

+1 on adding more documentation regarding gRPC and protobuf. We will strengthen this.

[ftrotter]

libz was only required when I followed the instructions for installing gRPC.. and I only installed gRPC because of my slavish devotion to following installation instructions to the letter.

My use case only involves one and only one library, the Storage code.. so it sounds like gRPC is not really something I should be attending to. It would have been good to be able to exclude, just because it makes my php setup more complex, which is something I like to avoid if at all possible.

[dwsupplee]

libz was only required when I followed the instructions for installing gRPC

Was this while compiling gRPC from source, or via PECL? If does look like this is a known issue that is being worked on, thankfully.

I only installed gRPC because of my slavish devotion to following installation instructions to the letter

Was it this snippet in the README which prompted you to install gRPC? We can clarify it, as it is not intended to come across as a requirement.

My use case only involves one and only one library, the Storage code.. so it sounds like gRPC is not really something I should be attending to. It would have been good to be able to exclude, just because it makes my php setup more complex, which is something I like to avoid if at all possible.

That's correct, Storage does not use gRPC. You can exclude installing the gRPC extension, there is no requirement on installing it at any point in the library unless you are using the gRPC dependent libraries which are Spanner and Firestore (required for HTTP/2 streaming capabilities provided through gRPC). If you would like to install just the Storage component and not pull down the rest of the libraries as the google/cloud package does, you can require google/cloud-storage alone instead. This should reduce the number of dependencies you need and only pulls in code related to Storage.

[dwsupplee]

Similarly to #1000, we have made some updates to our docs in this regard. Please let us know what you think :)

[ftrotter]

much clearer. Thank you!!

-FT