Thanks for the report. Looking into you issue made me realize that my latest changes broke the windows build in general since windows doesn't seem to look kindly upon symlinks. I'll look into that ASAP, meanwhile b71bab833667d62a87fcfa921dc167cf36767657 should build

The read me says

If you intend to use the included well known types then don't forget to
copy the contents of the 'include' directory somewhere as well, for example
into '/usr/local/include/'.

Well that not a normal location on windows. windows does not really have standard places for includes. The windows SDK header files are in well known places but you would not want to mess with those dirs. If you have custom includes for a project you add a -I for wherever the files are

You may have gotten hung up on the fact that Windows has different paths and Windows may not have default include locations (even though the C/C++ compilers for sure do echo "" | clang -xc++ -E -v -). We're specifically interested in the protoc compiler. So as long as that one finds the well-known types, we're golden, agreed?

Installing from google website or via winget just unzip them.

That's correct. And yet no need for OS default include locations. The proto-compiler implementation will automatically add $(where.exe protoc)/../include as a default include path as implemented here.

I suspect you didn't install protoc using winget or have another installation shadow it.

It certainly works for me as well as the Windows builds added in the latest release. You can consider just using the pre-built binary.

Tangent: the rabbit hole goes even deeper, I was also taking a quick look at prost, which is responsible for invoking the compiler, which states:

With prost-build v0.11 release, protoc will be required to invoke
compile_protos (unless skip_protoc is enabled). Prost will no longer provide
bundled protoc or attempt to compile protoc for users. For install
instructions for protoc, please check out the [protobuf install] instructions.

(source: https://github.com/tokio-rs/prost/blob/68cf18a530b5577b108480477902d767b7a344f1/README.md?plain=1#L62C1-L65C81)

However, it seems they went back on that decision for windows: tokio-rs/prost#1145, i.e. if you don't have protoc installed in your path, the build should also work.

Looking into you issue made me realize that my latest changes broke the windows build in general since windows doesn't seem to look kindly upon symlinks. I'll look into that ASAP, meanwhile b71bab8 should build

Ok, one can make symlinks work (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5917249/git-symbolic-links-in-windows/59761201#59761201):

• Make sure your account has permissionst to use mklink, e.g by enabling developer mode
• Tell git to use it, e.g. git config core.symlinks true

With that I was able to build at HEAD. I'll reminisce if we can further minimize the need for link. They became necessary due to how cargo builds packages to release the trailbase crate.

my bad on protoc. I had it installed in my tools folder. removed it an use what winget setup, it now works