Is this a regression?

What are the contents and the size of the directory where you ran gorelease?

/cc @jayconrod

https://github.com/golang/mod/blob/89ce4c7ba8043b0e8a8c03f1a266fb0e56637314/zip/zip.go#L28-L30
This is the limit used by the go command.

The reproducer is an internal repo, so I am not sure I can share it. That being said, it does not reproduce on other modules or with an older version of gorelease, CL 197299/4.

Is the source tree actually that large? Or can this be reproduced with a smaller tree? If so, how?

The go command limits modules to 500 MiB. It's important that gorelease reports that error to warn developers against tagging a release that others won't be able to download.

Considering that gorelease@master, but not go build, go test, go mod tidy or old gorelease, fails during ci, I strongly suspect that there is a bug in gorelease. Because of the proprietary nature of the source that triggers this, let me know if there is debugging information that I can provide.

it does not reproduce on other modules or with an older version of gorelease, CL 197299/4.

In the diff between patch set 4 of CL 197299 and the final patch set 15 that was merged, the go.mod went from requiring golang.org/x/mod at v0.1.0 to v0.1.1-0.20191107180719-034126e5016b. That change implemented the check that "total size in bytes of a module zip file may be at most MaxZipFile bytes (500 MiB)" that @hyangah pointed out above.

Awesome thanks for the bisect!. Is this supposed to break for go build, and other toolchain commands, or is there some restriction that only applies to gorelease/golang.org/x/mod and if so, why?

When downloading a module go build and other commands will report an error if the size of the module zip file is over 500 MiB or if the total size of the files within the zip are over 500 MiB.

go build and other commands won't report an error if the main module exceeds that size though. There's nothing wrong with that. But gorelease does need to report an error.

For debugging, can you confirm the size of files within the module? I can't give a good one-liner to do that: du will help but make sure to exclude .git, vendor, and any nested modules, and don't follow symlinks. zip.CreateFromDir is the function that gorelease uses, so you could try that.

Found the issue, the module is for a library that is polyglottal and node_modules is blowing through our quota. It is not committed, and really should not be part of the module, so I will change some names to use _s. Thanks a bunch. May be worth having a more descriptive error or writing up the problem in a blog post somewhere when go release comes out?

A more descriptive error would be good. Or a pointer to a more complete description (#37414).

I realize from this discussion that it's not at all obvious why gorelease would be doing anything with zip files.

It is not committed

If a very large file or directory is not committed, it would not be a real problem, so gorelease reporting that is a false positive as far as I understand. Is there already an issue tracking whether improving that is feasible?

Edit: On the other hand, it may be a real problem if the code requires that file to be present in the module, so things work during local testing, but not after the module is published. But I don't know for sure if detecting that type of issue is in scope for gorelease.

I concur, in general I think the error is warranted, just a little confusing. I was including non Go artefacts in a module, so that issue is mine.

Relatedly, I moved all NodeJS code in the repo to _js, .js, and testdata, but none had an effect, is there something I am missing wrt excluding folders from modules? Do I need to drop a submodule to exclude this directory?

If a very large file or directory is not committed, it would not be a real problem, so gorelease reporting that is a false positive as far as I understand. Is there already an issue tracking whether improving that is feasible?

gorelease mostly just looks at the source tree and ignores the VCS repository. It could be changed to report an error when there are pending changes.

Relatedly, I moved all NodeJS code in the repo to _js, .js, and testdata, but none had an effect, is there something I am missing wrt excluding folders from modules? Do I need to drop a submodule to exclude this directory?

Yes, that would probably be the easiest thing. _js, .js, and testdata would all be included in the module zip file.

That is more than a little ungainly, but _js is not a boon for readability either. Do we have this requirement documented somewhere? Clearly I was working off bad information about what the build toolchain ignores, so it would be nice to point to something authoritative.

Module zip files describes this restriction and others. I can't claim it's authoritative yet (still in draft state), but it will be in the future when it's complete.

sgtm, I think using #37414 to track the new glossary code is fine, so I will close this out.