Installing protoc on Linux Mint
This was going to be a blog post about installing protoc on Linux Mint, as that took me far longer and way more Stack Overflow posts than I expected it to. However, as you will see below, the lesson I really took from this experience is to try another couple of times to find documentation before I give up and start debugging, particularly in well maintained code that’s used by an awful lot of people.
I work a bit with gRPC in my job but it’s within an ecosystem set up by other people, so lots of handy scripts to ease the way. I wanted to get a bit more of a feel for basic protobuf so decided to go through the installation instructions for Go and set it up at home to have a play. I got to the Compiling your protocol buffers section, clicked through the link of instruction 1 and came to a screeching halt.
I did a lot of “try to run install, get error message, work out how to solve error message” with a variety of Stack Overflow posts until a particularly helpful Stack Overflow post pointed me directly to the README with the full installation instructions in src of the repo. Very much a head desk moment! Once you’ve found them, those instructions are great and straight out tell you everything I pieced together myself over the course of half an hour.
So yes, what I have learnt today is that sometimes the README you need is in src, and that you can install protoc on Linux Mint by following the instructions in https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/master/src/README.md.
