These were added 4 years ago; since then there are no known users. Using
Istio as protobufs is generally not done, and if it is then users can
always generate their own python stubs as they do for java, c++, rust,
etc.
https://docs.buf.build/
Buf is the successor to https://github.com/uber/prototool which we
already use for linting.
This dramatically simplifies our Makefiles, which are both extremely
complicated and have led to numerous bugs historically, such as
https://github.com/istio/api/issues/1678.
This will make changes to the generation much simpler as well. For
example, to migrate to gogo protobuf, we will just need to change `gogo`
-> `go` in one location, rather than trying to wrangle 500 lines of
Makefiles. Additionally, its quite a bit faster - the whole proto stuff
is done in <1s now.
John Howard