FWIW, I find it quite convenient to be able to also quickly and easily fetch old release candidates, beta versions and "outdated" point releases when tracking down regressions. I'd thus propose to keep these versions.

You can always fetch any versions by cloning the dl repository, run the genv tool followed by go get.

The possible problems with having all versions are:

• Long list of packages in https://godoc.org/golang.org/dl
  (assuming people actually look at the documentation)
• Accidentally downloading an old version

They are not really strong points, so I guess keeping the old version is not a problem.

Thanks for the suggestion.

We generally don't remove old packages. When they're no longer developed, we freeze them, and when they're redundant or unnecessary, we deprecate them.

Old golang.org/dl/... packages are helpful for people who want to try old versions of Go, perhaps to compare something against a newer version. Issue #37156 is just 3 weeks old and was about making even more older Go versions easily accessible.

In the end, as you said, there aren't strong reasons to remove them, so let's close this until that changes.

Just for clarification, I was not suggesting to remove, as an example, all go1.8* versions, just go1.8 - go.1.8.6, keeping only go1.8.7.

Sorry, I overlooked that part. I think the same arguments still apply; we don't want to delete packages and there's a chance someone may want to compare patch releases of old Go versions.