Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

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Well, it's complicated, and we could brainstorm a few ideas. The problem seems to be that this brainstorming session never happened.

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" />

When we could have this:

    <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" />

And why this:

    <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}">

When the same tag could be "source-browser" or something similar? I'm sure many projects other than Go would be very happy to have features like this standardized and available for all of them to use, but the Go team sees no further than its own nose when designing this sort of thing.

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.

I agree that it would have been better to design these a little differently.

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!

>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Wait, using the same tag as an existing project to maintain compatibility is proof that Google doesn't play nice and didn't take them into account?

What? godoc.org made up a new tag, and pkg.go.dev doesn't use it, breaking compatibility. They failed twice.

I've had a hard time following who's doing what.

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