The Go tool doesn't observe symbolic links, generally. I thought we had an open issue about this but I can't find it.

I'm not sure which distro uses this sort of layout by default. At least it happens on my FreeBSD image which is configured with default parameters of FreeBSD installer (I guess so, maybe I chose ZFS instead of UFS) as follows:

% cat /etc/fstab 
# Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
/dev/ada0p2             none    swap    sw              0       0
fdesc                   /dev/fd fdescfs rw              0       0

% mount -p
zroot/ROOT/default  /           zfs rw,noatime,nfsv4acls    0 0
devfs           /dev            devfs   rw,multilabel   0 0
fdescfs         /dev/fd         fdescfs rw      0 0
zroot/tmp       /tmp            zfs rw,nosuid,noatime,nfsv4acls     0 0
zroot/usr/home      /usr/home       zfs rw,noatime,nfsv4acls    0 0
zroot/usr/ports     /usr/ports      zfs rw,nosuid,noatime,nfsv4acls     0 0
zroot/usr/src       /usr/src        zfs rw,noatime,nfsv4acls    0 0
zroot/var/crash     /var/crash      zfs rw,noexec,nosuid,noatime,nfsv4acls  0 0
zroot/var/log       /var/log        zfs rw,noexec,nosuid,noatime,nfsv4acls  0 0
zroot/var/mail      /var/mail       zfs rw,nfsv4acls    0 0
zroot/var/tmp       /var/tmp        zfs rw,nosuid,noatime,nfsv4acls     0 0

I have no idea how much people would be annoyed by this limitation, maybe a few?

Yeah I've observed this symlink on FreeBSD too.

The question is whether it is just a test failure or indicative of a limitation of the Go tool? It shouldn't be a problem to have your GOPATH inside a symlinked directory. Or, rather, if it wasn't a problem in Go 1.4 it shouldn't become a problem now.

FWIW, if you are using ZFS, only thing you have to do is just;

# zfs set mountpoint=/home $(storagePoolName)/usr/home

I have no idea how much people would be annoyed by this limitation, maybe a few?

At least one. I don't think it is new, I ran into this before.

FWIW, if you are using ZFS, only thing you have to do is just;
zfs set mountpoint=/home $(storagePoolName)/usr/home

A less intrusive fix is to change your home directory to the path without symlink in /etc/passwd.
It's especially annoying on machines where you don't have root access, as you have to remember to do a cd /usr/home/<me> before using go.

I have no idea how much people would be annoyed by this limitation, maybe a few?

It's fairly common for /home to be symlinked.

Is the vendor import behaviour itself broken or is it just the test ? If it's just the test, then I imagine this is no biggie. If vendoring itself won't work in a symlinked path, then IMO that should be fixed.

See https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-dev/74zjMON9glU/4lWCRDCRZg0J.

Vanilla Go 1.4 source tree doesn't have this issue. As @adg said above, someone will disable TestVendorRun before the Go 1.5 cutoff when there's no easy fix.

CL https://golang.org/cl/12194 mentions this issue.