protobuf-c may be unmaintained/abandoned

[ringerc]

So, here's a possible hiccup.

I reached out to Maarten Fonvil, who maintains the main Protobuf Launchpad PPA, about whether he had any interest in protobuf-c.

He didn't, and furthermore roped in the Debian maintainer László Böszörményi (GCS), who warned that

The extra problem is that protobuf-c is not and official source
code but developed and maintained by Robert S. Edmonds. It seems he
doesn't develop it further and its Debian package is outdated even
(1.2.1 in Debian vs 1.3.0 upstream).
It seems protobuf-c is a dead-end. :(

[...]

Do you need protobuf-c or protobuf itself is enough for your goals?
At least I do not have time for protobuf-c, sorry. The question is,
what's the plans of Robert about it.

The last protobuf-c release was a year ago, which is hardly prehistoric, but is a little concerning for something moving this fast.

It's possible protobuf-c may be worse than Thrift.

All in all, it's a right mess. Thrift uses glib and anyway Jaeger's IDL for Thrift is still faulty, so it misgenerates code. But protobuf-c may be abandonware.

I might have to revisit trying to get Jaeger to fix their IDL so I can fix the Thrift support in jaeger-client-cpp. Or give in and help convert to Thrift/glib, blech. At least that way there'd be backend support.