Provide grpc-xds artifact w/o the need of grpc-netty-shaded

[alesj]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Yes.
The problem is when we try to generate a (GraalVM) native image with grpc-xds as a dependency

• https://gist.githubusercontent.com/alesj/a883aaf61689017ecdb27db10f035a1e/raw/0b1497f184cf5159aecddb88431343e00bda4ece/gistfile1.txt

This is what I get when I exclude grpc-netty-shaded dependency ...

• https://gist.githubusercontent.com/alesj/ea725449ca80c0406be372d9194a81aa/raw/a1f52580f6f8b289da9359c0ff11f50b9b2b87db/gistfile1.txt

Describe the solution you'd like

To have a grpc-xds jar, which doesn't depend on grpc-netty-shaded.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Currently none.
Dunno if I can 'trick' GraalVM to handle this ...

Additional context

This is where we depend on grpc-xds

• https://github.com/alesj/quarkus/tree/xds1/extensions/grpc/runtime

And current PR

• Add XDS support to gRPC extension quarkusio/quarkus#29251

[ejona86]

This error is reported at image build time because class io.grpc.netty.shaded.io.netty.util.internal.logging.Log4J2LoggerFactory is registered for linking at image build time by command line

This class is also transitively pulled in via grpc-netty, so anything that makes grpc-netty work should also make grpc-netty-shaded work. Why would this not be a problem for grpc-netty?

Excluding grpc-netty-shaded is definitely broken. We have code that tries to rewrite io.netty's configuration (since #8258). Maybe something there isn't working like we'd hope.

[ejona86]

(I will say we don't have any real familiarity with GraalVM static compilation, other than theory. So changes for this stuff have typically come from those more experienced.)

[alesj]

Yeah, the 1st error is weird -- as the Log4JLogger class is next to the 'factory' that wants to create it ... so no idea why that breaks.

There is more context here:

• https://quarkusio.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/187038-dev/topic/native.20image.20issues.20.2B.20grpc-netty-shaded

I did manage to get around this by extracting xDS stuff into a new module / jar, so our plain gRPC extension works as before; native and all ...

[ejona86]

We'd love contributions to make this easier, but we don't have the experience to figure out what is getting confused. So if someone figures out a way to make the GraalVM experience more seemless, please open an issue/PR.