[gentoo-dev] rfc: go ebuilds installing packages to $GOROOT/pkg

[William Hubbs]

All,

I want to start a discussion here about the go ebuilds we have in the
tree that are installing *.a files to $GOROOT/pkg. From now on in this
message, when I say package, I mean a *.a file.

dev-lang/go must do this, because it includes the standard library.
However, I do not think third party programs written in go should put
their packages there, or maybe anywhere at all, for a couple of reasons.

First, the format of Go's packages is not guaranteed to be the same for
new releases of Go; only source level compatibility is guaranteed [1].
This means every thircd party Go package should be rebuilt every time
dev-lang/go is bumped. I thought about subslotting dev-lang/go, but
given the second consideration, that seems to be a lot of overhead
without a good reason unless I am missing something.

The second consideration is that go's packages are static; they are only
used at build time. Once you have a go binary compiled, you do not need
any external libraries to run the binary, and normally in Gentoo, we do
not keep static libraries around.

These considerations, combined with how "go get" pulls all dependencies
of a project, lead me to wonder if we should have ebuilds in the tree
for Go projects that only install packages.

I'm interested in hearing what people think.

William

[1] https://golang.org/doc/go1compat