Proto Best Practices — references to googleapis/googleapis common objects

👋🏻 hey folks!

Not sure if this is an actual issue or just missing documentation, so feel free to point me out to the right place.

I am wondering how do people deal with "common" protobuf messages that are referenced in the "Proto Best Practices" document but are not shipped with the protoc compiler. I am talking about google.types.* specifically here, which are located in the googleapis/googleapis. Feels a bit strange relying on someone's else API schemas.

• Why aren't these messages part of the well-known types shipped with the protobuf?
• How do people generally make them available in the CI and to the developers? Copy? Clone? Use googleapis/api-common-protos?
• Does it make sense to include these into the protocolbuffers project itself?

Thanks in advance!