What version of Go are you using (go version)?

1.8.1

What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)?

linux

Explanation of the issue

In projects using different languages and tools, it is difficult to always clone a Go code repository inside a GOPATH. This makes it difficult for external tools to build Go projects. What I want to achieve is:

• Clone a go project anywhere you want
• Run a shell script or a Makefile to build an executable, it should work

This is possible using a temporary GOPATH in the script, and symlinks, but not easy to do.

Proposal

Have a GOPATH_MOUNTS environment variable containing a list of directories and their name in the go package hierarchy. Those directories will be read as if they were mounted in the GOPATH/src/source-location.

For example:

GOPATH=/home/me/go
GOPATH_MOUNTS=github.com/me/foo=/home/me/project/foo:github.com/me/bar=/home/me/project/bar

With this configuration, a package github.com/me/foo/a would be searched in /home/me/project/foo/a while a package github.com/me/baz would still be searched under /home/me/go/src/github.com/me/baz.

Actual workarounds

I'm currently using two workarounds, mainly. The first is simple. The git repository is a gopath in itself, and won't be able to be imported. This is the case of https://github.com/mildred/ipfs-objects/

The other solution is to use some tricks with symlinks in the Makefile to build the project even if outside of the GOPATH. The main idea is to setup a custom GOPATH using:

IMPORT_PATH=github.com/me/foo
mkdir -p "gopath/src/$IMPORT_PATH"
ln -s "$PWD" "gopath/src/$IMPORT_PATH"
export GOPATH="$PWD/gopath"
go build "$IMPORT_PATH"