Note that some features are absent here. You can't click on any of the declarations to view their source, for example. This is the degraded view for unknown hosts.
Actually, pkg.go.dev needs to have some way of figuring out where to link to, so it's not necessarily easy to automatically make links that work for 100% of the sites. That's not "a blatant failure to comprehend the fundamentally decentralized nature of git hosting", that's having to deal with a large ecosystem spread out over thousands of domains. Go's model is a lot more decentralized than most other package systems (which also makes stuff like this harder).
Except being the key word here. My commentary is on the quality of their engineering approach and I have demonstrated that their approach is flawed. Their approach is wrong.
What is the goal of your post? To inform your readership, or to convince them that Google is bad? If it's the former, then you have done your readership a great disservice. If it's the latter – which seems to be the case – then congratulations: you've fooled your readship – or at least part of it – in to believing something that's not true.
And you've been misleading yourself: it's not a "single feature" - several features depend on this code. It is a second-class experience, and in ways that build upon other problems I've put into the article.
Cut the bullshit, dude.
There’s a big difference between requiring explicit site inclusion for full functionality and requiring inclusion for any functionality, and your post claims the latter.
Ehm, there is a massive difference between something not working at all and one feature not working. My car's headlights not working is not the same as my car not working. My laptop's trackpad not working is not the same as my laptop not working.
> And you've been misleading yourself: it's not a "single feature" - several features depend on this code.
I use pkg.go.dev almost daily (including for sr.ht repos on two occasions) and have never noticed this. It's fine to point out that there's a degraded feature-set and be angry about that (some people probably care about these features more than I do), but claiming that the entire thing isn't working is – and I feel like a broken record with this – just not true. It's just not. No matter what you say.
This is easily fixed by just changing a few words. I don't get how anyone can defend this. If someone would point out such a thing on my own website I would drop everything and promptly fix it, no matter how strongly I believed in the main point I was making (and I have actually done so) as I want to be as accurate as I can reasonably be.
You know, you actually inspired me to work on open source full-time last year? True story, that's what I do most days now, for almost a year to the day. This is what I wrote a year ago:
> Drew DeVault’s sourcehut in particular was inspirational in actually making the step. If Drew can do it, then why not me? [..] I know it’s a risk and that there’s a decent chance this will fail. That’s okay. I’d rather take a chance to try to achieve a goal and fail instead of always playing it on safe. Not doing anything is also a decision – which you can regret just as much as any other – and the worst thing that can happen is that I lose some money and end up taking a job again. Doesn’t strike me as so bad, in the grand scheme of things.
But with this like this – and this is not the first time I've seen you do it – you've lost a tremendous amount of respect. I don't care that you write rants (okay, it's not my preferred style, but whatever) but when you're being misleading and then defend that on account of "but my point was correct" then ... yeah nah... It's hard to be inspired by someone like that.
I don't expect that you'll care a great deal, but just so you know regardless. Do with it what you will.
One problem is that the import path doesn't really give you enough information to totally figure out how to fetch the package. It's treated like a URL, and then the go-source tag comes in to relate it to something VCS-controlled. If we encoded the VCS into the import, we could e.g. have "git+https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/getopt" as the import path, or we could move the import details into a separate file (like go.mod).
But if we assume that the import path and go.mod formats are fixed, then we still have more things we could do. For example, why this:
<meta name="go-import" content="git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/getopt git https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/getopt" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/x-git-http" "https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/getopt" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/x-git-ssh" "git@git.sr.ht:~sircmpwn/getopt" />
<meta name="go-source" content="git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/getopt https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/getopt
https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/getopt/tree/master{/dir}
https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/getopt/tree/master{/dir}/{file}#L{line}">
And furthermore, with the specific case of hardcoded software hosts on pkg.go.dev, why isn't it using the go-source meta tags to look up how to create links to files & line numbers? You guys forced this upon us and then don't even use it? There's no reason to hard-code regexes for various git domains when you could just fetch it like godoc.org does.
In the first case the go-import meta tag is totally unnecessary. The go tool and module proxy can discover git repos from an import path just fine. It’s only required for “custom” import paths where the path is some domain but the code lives somewhere else, like github.
In the latter case the decision to use go-source was actually made by the original author of godoc.org, not a google employee, and was done in coordination with another non-google initiative (gopkg.in) to make their source links work. So nothing to do with the go team really, sorry.
https://github.com/golang/gddo/commit/864b1c0aba009e37d30136...
If pkg.go.dev isn’t respecting go-source meta tags then that should probably be fixed. It would also imo be worth considering devising a more general, well-known mechanism for doing this. Worth proposing I think!
The relevant docs are here:
https://golang.org/cmd/go/#hdr-Remote_import_paths
You can explicitly put ".git" into your import path, but no one does this and it's not explained to new users. In order to have predictable import paths like people have been trained to use, you need go-import tags.
>In the latter case the decision to use go-source was actually made by the original author of godoc.org, not a google employee, and was done in coordination with another non-google initiative (gopkg.in) to make their source links work. So nothing to do with the go team really, sorry.
And yet, godoc.org is what you're replacing. Not taking into consideration is how you end up with what you've got: regression. And this only further betrays Google's warped worldview of "us and only us": this person has made an amazing contribution to Go and yet you consider them an other and don't take their design into account.
>If pkg.go.dev isn’t respecting go-source meta tags then that should probably be fixed. It would also imo be worth considering devising a more general, well-known mechanism for doing this. Worth proposing I think!
No, it's not worth proposing: it's worth doing, and should have been done in the first place. It should not take an outsider - it should happen naturally from a good engineering ethos. Playing well with others is your burden, not everyone else's.
I don’t even know where to begin with addressing this criticism. To say that you have a warped view of the situation is putting it mildly. I’m just going to back out of this conversation while the going is good.
https://godoc.org/git.lukeshu.com/go/libfastimport
So that's not against pkg.dev. Did somebody look into why?
Anyway it seems that the repo was not added to pkg.dev automatically:
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/38326
and the automatic fetching should work now:
The way this works (or rather, worked) is that you first need to "go get" a module and then it gets picked up by the pkg.go.dev system. This works like that for every site, and was kind weird and confusing, although as you mentioned this was improved on recently. Either way: not related to that module being on sr.ht; that's just coincidental.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24024130
It doesn't work on godoc.org not because they don't recognize your domain, but because cgit doesn't have go-source meta tags.
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/39559
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/40477
That is why they decided to turn it into an internal/source package inside pkgsite first to have test cases for a later go-source-2. If your site does not show source links on pkg.go.dev then add a comment to issue 40477 above and an exception will be added.
- internal/source: https://github.com/golang/pkgsite/blob/master/internal/sourc...
Note1: Maybe mention this on your website because that took a little to find. It does not fit into the narrative though.
Note2: Requiring frontends to offer meta tags is the only way to make code discoverable with the url alone. cgit not offering this is on cgit and not on Go/pkgsite (haven't checked whether they do)