Why imports are not enough to define code generation?

[rbroggi]

In a project where you have inter/intra package dependencies, I find it strange and redundant the fact that we need to specify all the protos to gripmock even after providing the --imports flag.

Let's take the multi-package example:

We have the following dependencies:

1. hello.proto -> bar/bar.proto
2. hello.proto -> foo.proto

Those dependencies are already explicit in the hello.proto through the import statements and having to re-state all the *.proto that are present in the dependency graph sounds like redundant and not scalable:

gripmock --stub=example/multi-package/stub --imports=example/multi-package/ \
  example/multi-package/foo.proto example/multi-package/hello.proto \
  example/multi-package/bar/bar.proto &

I would expect to have something more similar to:

gripmock --stub=example/multi-package/stub --imports=example/multi-package/ example/multi-package/hello.proto 

this thing becomes especially critical if the underlying dependency graph grows a lot.

WDYT?