The Story Of $GOPATH

Presented as a lightning talk at GopherConIndia 2017.

New programmers are often frustrated when they encounter $GOPATH while setting up their development environment. $GOPATH also establishes constraints over dependency management.

I talked about how GOPATH came along and what were people's reactions on it. I also talked about some of the proposals that have been in discussion to tackle this problem.

Transcript

1. @TheNikhita
   The Story of $GOPATH
   

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2. Nikhita Raghunath
   Twitter: @TheNikhita
   Github: nikinath
   Website: https://nikinath.github.io/
   @TheNikhita
   

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3. Before GOPATH was born...
   $GOROOT $GOOS $GOARCH
   Used to find
   compiler and
   standard library
   Mostly used for
   cross compiling
   purposes
   @TheNikhita
   

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4. $GOPATH is born!
   @TheNikhita
   

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5. Some said nice things...
   Easy to
   compute import
   paths of
   packages!
   Store
   dependencies
   fetched by go get!
   @TheNikhita
   

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6. @TheNikhita
   

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7. But others said...
   WHAT THE
   HELL IS
   IT?!!!
   @TheNikhita
   

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8. What they complained
   ● Newbie adoption
   ● Phobic to freely located directories
   ● Only one copy of dependencies
   ● Can’t have vendored packages outside of
   $GOPATH
   @TheNikhita
   

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9. Some alternatives
   ● Godep
   ● Gb
   ● Have separate gopaths for different projects
   ● HelloGopher
   @TheNikhita
   

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10. Current state of $GOPATH
    Go 1.8 release means a default $GOPATH! Yay!!
    ● $HOME/go on Unix
    ● %USERPROFILE%\go on Windows
    If you want, you can also set it to whatever you like!
    Thanks to Francesc Campoy for this!
    @TheNikhita
    

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11. Future - RIP?
    1. Drop pkg in favor of a hidden cache directory.
    2. Use the ./vendor directory as $GOPATH/src. Go get
    automatically downloads packages to ./vendor.
    3. When walking up the filesystem to the root, whenever
    /foo/bar/src is found, /foo/bar is prepended as a
    $GOPATH.
    @TheNikhita
    

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12. Future?
    4. Record the expected import prefix in a manifest file.
    (Kang)
    5. Infer the full import path from a git configuration.
    (Kodos)
    6. With the official dependency tool, things might change!
    Lots of suspense!!
    @TheNikhita
    

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13. Fin
    

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