Can you share what the RPC trace looks like for this in your gopls logs?

Actually the issue appears to be that the Configuration call is made with two identical items and govim currently doesn't know what to do in that case:

Configuration: &protocol.ConfigurationParams{
    Items: {
        {ScopeURI:"file:///home/myitcv/gostuff/src/github.com/myitcv/playground", Section:"gopls"},
        {ScopeURI:"file:///home/myitcv/gostuff/src/github.com/myitcv/playground", Section:"playground"},
    },
}

Is there a difference between these two?

I believe that this was to allow users to set per-folder configurations in their settings, but @ianthehat can probably clarify this further.

It will ask for the global "gopls" configuration as well as one per workspace folder (in this case "playground") using the name the workspace folder was given.
It does it this way because the same folder can be opened more than once, with different configurations so long as the name is different.
This would allow you for instance to open the same folder twice with differing build tags.

Thanks. A few follow up questions (which we can move elsewhere if you'd prefer):

• What is the relationship between the "gopls" configuration and the "playground" configuration?
• In this case I don't believe I did anything explicit with regards to the workspace folder. Where does the name "playground" come from?
• Would the absolute path to the directory not be better than simply "playground" (which I'm assuming is the base of the directory containing the go.mod)

The "gopls" configuration is global, and applied first, the "playground" configuration is workspace folder specific and applied after, it can thus override things from the global configuration if needed.

Workspace folders always have a name (https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/specification#workspace_workspaceFolders). If you are not using workspace folders and just specifying a root uri, then we make a workspace folder for you which has a name set from the basename of the root uri.

The path is not unique, only the name is. For instance, you could open {uri:"file:///home/myitcv/gostuff/src/github.com/myitcv/playground",name:"playground_windows"} and {uri:"file:///home/myitcv/gostuff/src/github.com/myitcv/playground",name:"playground_osx"} at the same time, and respond with appropriate configurations such that they have the right GOOS and represent that folder for the two OSs.

Thanks very much for the detailed explanation. There's clearly no issue here on the gopls side, so I'll close this.