I'm creating this as a master issue to track this long-standing problem. Several people have encountered this problem, but no one seems to know the correct way to solve it.

Here are several issues that say that installing the protobuf package makes other Python packages under the google. namespace inaccessible because protobuf has no __init__.py. All of these issues were reported against version <= 3.0.0b2: #713 #859 #1153 #1272

These issues were supposed to be fixed by this PR: #1259 That PR was integrated into a new release on PyPI, 3.0.0b2.post1 (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/protobuf/3.0.0b2.post1).

However that PR caused a different bug: #1294 googleapis/google-cloud-python#1570

We need a solution to this problem, but finding a solution that works has proven to be elusive. Would very much appreciate anyone who can propose a fix they are confident will fix all of these problems.