Feature request

It should ultimately become possible to go get https://example.com/path/to/release-latest.tar.xz and use the package as import "example.com/path/to/release", or something like that.

Rationale

1. To support a pre-existing packaging workflow that produces tarball artefacts
2. To offer a maximally lightweight method for deploying go get-able packages on low-end servers.

Implementation

I think it should be possible to implement initially in src/cmd/go/vcs.go as a new vcsCmd type that shells out to external wget/curl and tar binaries, in much the same way as the existing code.

The go-get process for tarballs is simple enough that it should eventually be rewritten to use internal http/tar/unzip libraries where possible, improving the cross-platform story (especially on Windows where external curl/wget/tar binaries are unexpected). But, i think this would require refactoring the helper method func (v *vcsCmd) run1 to not always assume it's operating on an external command binary - and archive/tar does not automatically implement compression for the common case of tar.(gz|bz2|xz), so that would need to be processed too.