Why the dependency on protobuf?

[wesleyhillyext]

This snowflake-ingest-java library (unshaded) depends on protobuf-java 4.x. That introduces some issues since the Java community at large is still trying to digest the protobuf 3.x to 4.x shift. So when other libraries are still on protobuf-java 3.x we get issues since the two versions are incompatible.

After looking into it more, I'm wondering why snowflake-ingest-java even declares a dependency on protobuf-java? I didn't find any imports from the com.google.protobuf in the code. Andpom.xml seems to then exclude any of the files from protobuf-java with <exclude>google/protobuf/**/*.proto</exclude>.

If I excluded protobuf-java 4.x from my application, or overrode it to 3.x, would there be any consequences for use of snowflake-ingest-java?

[sfc-gh-xhuang]

We will review our dependency list again soon to ensure we remove the ones that we don't need.

I think the protobuf dependency was introduced recently because we wanted to override the version from another package:
#838

@sfc-gh-alhuang can we remove this explicit dependency now that we've upgraded some of the other packages?