File generation strips directories (unlike other languages)

[apple]

File generation strips directories (unlike other languages)

[tbkka]

Ignoring the package name when generating filenames was a very deliberate decision on my part.

I've many times in the past tried to use protoc with make or Xcode build rules and found it very frustrating. Having the generator build a single output file in the current directory from a single input file makes it easy to do simple things with common build systems. (This is also why the plugin does not mangle filenames like the Obj-C generator does or build multiple output files for a single input like the Java generator does.)

Tools like Bazel with specialized knowledge of proto semantics may be necessary for complex cases, but are overkill for common cases where people have just one or two protos in a project.

I would not be opposed to having alternate mechanisms that can generate more structured output, but I'm reluctant to make simple cases complicated by default.

[tbkka]

Re-reading, I now realize that the proposal was to use the input directory name when generating the output, not the input package name. The directory name is visible to build tools, so I could agree to that.