Project requires an old version of Protobuf

[wingdagger]

The following setup.py file requires version ~=3.20 of protobuf. This is a very old release. Protobuf is currently on version 5.26.1. This constraint of ~=3.20 is causing conflicts when I generate my python dependencies. Can you please allow for newer versions of protobuf? Thank you.

https://github.com/onnx/tensorflow-onnx/blob/ed022438576ca7a351c3858105439f4f25c35219/setup.py#L85C95-L85C111

[fatcat-z]

Thanks for your comments..

At this moment, tf2onnx is still designed to support older TensorFlow versions as many as possible and some of them could not work on a version above 3.20.x. In addition, couple of dependencies of tf2onnx also required the protobuf version ~= 3.20.0, so we can't upgrade its version in setup.py now.

[wingdagger]

Thank you for the fast response. Shouldn't tensorflow indicate the prereq version of protobuf that it requires. tf2onnx should not need to specify versions required by another project, right?

[yan12125]

Shouldn't tensorflow indicate the prereq version of protobuf that it requires.

Apparently only tensorflow > 2.10 does that. That's probably why many tests fail with older tensorflow versions in #2327.

[yan12125]

Here is an idea: Python 3.11 is supported since tensorflow 2.12. I think it's safe to say on Python >= 3.11, tensorflow already properly specifies compatible protobuf versions. How about something like this?

install_requires=[
    # (other dependencies)
    'protobuf~=3.20; python_version < "3.11"',
    'protobuf; python_version >= "3.11"',
]

In addition, couple of dependencies of tf2onnx also required the protobuf version ~= 3.20.0

I didn't check other dependencies. Such a trick may apply as well.