Package private toPb() methods

Is there any reason why the toPb() methods are package private? I have found myself in situations more than once where it would have been beneficial to have them as public.

(… and yes, I can work around it, I’m just curious what is the logic behind this.)

[nbali]

This might make sense, when it’s very rare that someone wants to work with the actual Protobuf class, but what my issue usually looks like is that the class with the package private method just wraps a similar class from another library which might be actually in use in many projects/services/implementations. For example: https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-java/blob/6666cdd62c0957afb5fb450e5fcf0fbe3e427225/google-cloud-clients/google-cloud-bigquery/src/main/java/com/google/cloud/bigquery/JobInfo.java#L315-L334 The referenced class might be a Protobuf one - IDK, and haven’t checked -, but TBH that is not the use-case it was needed for. What I needed was a com.google.api.services.bigquery.model.Job instance from a previously configured com.google.cloud.bigquery.Job, so I can further use it with code that expects classes from the legacy library, and not this one.

Still, okay, let’s say I get it, the goal was to make it as noob-friendly as possible, but then at least make the workaround part of the project itself, and don’t force devs who actually know what are they doing, to do extra work everytime they need to access a package private method.

[rahulKQL]

@nbali Sorry for the late response. I agree with your reasoning.

@kolea2, @ajaaym Would you please let us know your stand on these internal methods