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Comment by tscs37 | Hacker News Reader

Create the folder ~/Projects/go and use it as gopath, I recommend a vendoring tool to prevent cluttering.

This is what I've ended up doing, and it still drives me absolutely batty. Typically I'd group together all of the code and assets for a project in one place; any Go code has to exist in this separate namespace for no convincing reason.

It's fine, I can work around it, but it's still quite annoying.

I think I am in the same boat -- Go file layout model seems to be for multiple projects written in Go instead of (my typical case) a multi-language project with a component in Go.

It is not really a big deal, I can overcome it with some simlinks and conventions, but this is not elegant; I hope a model to support this better will be added sometime.

>any Go code has to exist in this separate namespace for no convincing reason.

The convincing reason is that you get several automated behaviors in fetching, installing and building this way.

If you don't care for those, you can use whatever path you like for your code, and a custom makefile for building.

Just don't expect "go build", "go install" etc to work.

Something I pretty much do and have heard from other Go people that they do this also, is to just keep all my projects in the GOPATH. Whether they be written in Go or not. It essentially gives you an organised structure based on git URLs, so it's always easy to find anything. I use $HOME/go, and have projects in there written in a bunch of languages.

I do this. It's actually a pretty good way to organize code in general, not just Go. Still dumb that they force it on you.

Most tutorials (all? I had to RTFM) outright omit how to use gopath. Especially with forks.

Must be some shit tutorials. The ones I read were great. Did you just take "some-random-guy"'s blog at face value? There's an official Go home-page full of beginner guides.

Bad tutorials then.

Right, but if all of the tutorials are bad, it kind of points to a problem elsewhere.

https://golang.org/doc/install

This is the official installation document. If you have problems finding proper tutorials, there is also

https://tour.golang.org

which also links to the previous document on install instructions.

That people aren't RTFM-ing?

No - that the ecosystem or decisions are difficult to understand or communicate effectively.

Setting an environment variable is trivial, and becoming aware of this requirement also trivial. It's all but spoon-fed here [0] and here [1].

I've never encountered anyone -- both online and offline -- who has had trouble with this beyond "huh, I didn't know I had to do that. Duly noted".

Until now, that is. You are making a mountain out of a molehill ... nay, an anthill.

[0] https://golang.org/doc/install

[1] https://golang.org/doc/code.html

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