Making protobuf version more flexible

[user799595]

Closes #2636

I haven't done any testing though

[rolandtannous]

@user799595 it would really help accelerate this if you do some sort of testing.

[user799595]

Thanks @rolandtannous.

I did some testing.

python -m venv testvenv1
source testvenv1/bin/activate
pip install "protobuf>=4.0"
pip install .

This works as expected, installed protobuf 6.31.1.

python -m venv testvenv2
source testvenv2/bin/activate
pip install "protobuf>=4.0"
pip install ".[sentencepiece]"

This downgraded protobuf as needed:

Successfully built unsloth
Installing collected packages: unsloth, protobuf
  Attempting uninstall: protobuf
    Found existing installation: protobuf 6.31.1
    Uninstalling protobuf-6.31.1:
      Successfully uninstalled protobuf-6.31.1
Successfully installed protobuf-3.20.3 unsloth-2025.5.7

Python version 3.11.5

[user799595]

Hello, is there any additional testing needed before we can merge this?

[rolandtannous]

@user799595 hello we're just trying to stabilize performance of the package with the latest transformers version first, then we'll look into this .

[danielhanchen]

Hmm protobuf is an annoyance due to sentencepiece yes

[danielhanchen]

It seems like #305

[user799595]

Cheers!