Go doesn’t “do” that.
Using GitHub HEAD is one of many ways it can be used. It’s not a very popular approach. People with important projects that often use other ways, such as vendoring via a tool like dep.
Using GitHub HEAD is one of many ways it can be used. It’s not a very popular approach. People with important projects that often use other ways, such as vendoring via a tool like dep.
Even projects using dep continue this pattern of pulling things from github master. I just browed through the top projects on Github for go and pretty much all of them that contained a gopkg.toml pulled in one or more things from github directly from master
https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/master/Gopkg.toml https://github.com/containous/traefik/blob/master/Gopkg.toml https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/Gopkg.t... https://github.com/github/hub/blob/master/Gopkg.toml
These include projects like graphana, cockroachdb and hugo.
Literally the first example of the Go tour [1] tells you to run "go get". "dep" is not (yet) an official part of Go's tooling. So when the only official tool fetches HEAD and calls it a day, I think it's perfectly fine to say "Go does that".
It was never intended to be a part of your production build process. If you push its outputs directly to production, you're holding it wrong.