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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

The go devs discuss this, they intend on adding a Go env file that package managers and users can use to set global flags for Go.

That would rely on installing Go from the distro repositories, though, and that's not what the official Go docs tell you to do.

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I hope software packagers for the various Linux distributions will disable this behavior, one or way or another, with or without the assistance of the Go developers. The official Go documentation can say whatever it wants, but in my experience the installation on Linux mostly happens via the distribution's package manager. The result would be that the software running for the majority of users will not send information to Google. It's not perfect, and won't do for some people (like me; I will remove Go and not write Go code in the future), but I think that'll remove the need for a fork for many people.

I've met quite a few (junior) devs who will follow guides instead of using their package manager because they come from Windows and aren't used to using their distro's tools.

I expect many professionals who do use Linux to run on stable possibly LTS versions of their distribution of choice and those rarely come with up to date tools for languages like Go or Rust or even Docker.

I wish installation would only come through package managers, but the amount of people I've had to help upgrade their Ubuntu to a newer version because they added a whole bunch of external repositories without realising the impact has taught me otherwise.

It's possible that distros will come out if the box with a /usr/share/go/env file even if Go isn't installed, but that'll take a while.

Good points, I could definitely be wrong in my estimate of the proportion of installations coming from the package manager. It may be that enough utility will be found in a fork. Nothing but to wait and see ;)

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