Yes. It's a terrible mess. But as of GopherCon a couple of weeks ago, the way forward is becoming clear. Most important, the Go Team is now in direct communication with the authors of the most widely used vendoring tools, and it seemed to be widely acknowledged that this is a severe problem, that a standard is needed, and that even things like "go get" might have to change. I'm very hopeful.

Putting your dependencies in a folder called "vendor/" is standard, but how you get them there isn't.

There's a collection of tools for managing that, like this one , and others like "godep" and "glide". Which one you use for that doesn't seem to be settled.

Yes, it's still an unsolved problem. All attempts at solving it feel like ugly hacks.

Manul is one of the very limited set of tools which provide idiomatically go-gettable projects without need of vendoring tool be installed on the user machine.

It is "solved", the problem is go devs using 15 incompatible solutions.