Installing Google Protocol Buffers on mac

Question

I would like to install the older version of Google Protocol Buffers (protobuf-2.4.1) on mac using Terminal command line. I tried with brew install protobuf, bu

Answer 1

I used macports

sudo port install protobuf-cpp

Answer 2

FWIW., the latest version of brew is at protobuf 3.0, and doesn't include any formulae for the older versions. This is somewhat "inconvenient".

While protobuf may be compatible at the wire level, it is absolutely not compatible at the level of generated java classes: you can't use .class files generated with protoc 2.4 with the protobuf-2.5 JAR, etc. etc. This is why updating protobuf versions is such a sensitive topic in the Hadoop stack: it invariably requires coordination across different projects, and is traumatic enough that nobody likes to do it.