(This issue is factored out from #29206 (comment).)

The website has been factored out into the cmd/golangorg command in the x/website repository (see #29206). At this time, there remain viable simplifications that were not possible back when it was a shared godoc binary in x/tools. Primarily, this is about reducing the number of unused configurations and code paths.

Resolving this will make development easier and reduce maintenance costs (less code paths to maintain).

Simplification Opportunities

Currently, there are these independent configuration axes:

1. cmd/golangorg can be built with golangorg build constraint or without
2. the content/static directory can be read from disk or via the static package that needs to be go generate
   • new files need to be manually added to gen.go
     • it is possible to make a mistake of forgetting to do this step (e.g., see CL 213937)
3. the GOROOT directory can be provided via a .zip file (-zip flag) or directly on disk (-goroot flag).

For 1, the build constraint can be removed. It was needed back when the website was the same binary as godoc, but that is no longer the case. However, need to consider how memcache and datastore clients will be configured for local testing vs prod (currently, they're always turned on when golangorg build constraint is satisfied, always off otherwise).

For 2, the static package was needed so users would be able to run godoc binary without its x/tools source code on disk (especially back when godoc was bundled into main distribution). When the golangorg binary is deployed, the repository filesystem is already included, and it should be always available during development. The static package needs to be constantly re-generated during development.

For 3, the ability to provide GOROOT contents via a zip instead of a directory on disk is also not being used at all right now, and I don't foresee a need for this. I think it was needed back when the website was deployed to an App Engine with some limits on filesystem access that are no longer applicable. If there is a need in the future (unlikely), we can re-introduce this feature.

Proposed State

I suggest we remove all 3 aforementioned options, the end result will be a single golangorg command without build constraints. It will read GOROOT directory from disk, and it will be provided the x/website/content directory on disk.

If we find that evaluating templates or rendering Markdown on each HTTP request is found to be slow or expensive, I think we can address that by adding a caching layer on top. We already do this on some pages, e.g., the https://golang.org/dl/ page uses a cache.

Deployment to production (both to golang.org, and to tip.golang.org) will continue to work. It'll be reading content from filesystem instead of the generated static package. It's already reading the favicon.ico and robots.txt files from the filesystem, as well as the entire GOROOT directory.

/cc @rsc @andybons @toothrot @cagedmantis