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What’s the problem with importing github.com/… in your projects, aside from possibly not being appealing to your personal taste?

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You could ask failed kickstarter projects Haunts: The Manse Macabre what the problem is. Just last week I compiled some 25 year old, K&R style C code and it worked. Will any go code compile in 10 years? 1 year?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-m...

Vendor it, and your code will always compile.

The principal question is what is the benefit of this monumental facepalm.

Data provenance.

Now explain your side.

You don't have to change #include paths in C++ (or Java imports) code when you move your project from github to bitbucket.

Have you looked at the build system of a C++ project lately? Or a Java project? It's not like that's some super-elegant not-at-all-rolling-catastrophe of a system.

Java and Node, for example, don't solve anything - to get something that builds sensibly they both entirely depend on "external service" being always available and enforcing naming (see the leftpad fiasco). C/C++ are the source of the term "dependency hell".

I've had to deal with CMake as well as automake/autoconf at work recently and I'll take Go's system of fetching/building any day over the Wild West that is the C/C++ eco-system.

It's an artifact of a tool. The same after-thought tool could have just dropped a mapping line in a .gotool file somewhere:

    $ go get whois etcd
    github.com/coreos/etcd

But no. We need to put that in every freaking file and thus transit from information to noise.

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