Support for protobuf 4.X

[jduan]

Thanks for stopping by to let us know something could be better!

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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Protobuf 4.X was released in Q1 2024 and many open source projects are migrating to that. I noticed that some libs under the umbrella of "google-cloud-java" still works only with protobuf 3.X. For example, com.google.cloud:google-cloud-dlp only works with protobuf-java 3.X.

Is there a plan to migrate to protobuf 4.X?

Describe the solution you'd like
What you want to happen.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Any alternative solutions or features you've considered.

Additional context
Any other context or screenshots about the feature request.

[Dustinhoefer]

Also looking forward to this.

How can it be that official google dependencies don't update their own dependencies?

[suztomo]

Cloud SDK for Java works with Protobuf Java 4. The release note about the change is at https://github.com/googleapis/java-cloud-bom/releases/tag/v26.50.0 . For compatibility purpose, libraries in this google-cloud-java repository declare Protobuf Java 3 as dependencies.

If you observe errors in google-cloud-dlp, please let us know about the error messages.