(Updated the title to be about lint.)

That's definitely a bug, but also x/lint is really not maintained and will probably be deprecated. See #38968.

Thank you for submitting this issue! As per #38968, we are freezing and deprecating golint. There's no drop-in replacement to golint per se, but you should find that Staticcheck works well in encouraging good Go code, much like golint did in the past, since it also includes style checks. There's always gofmt and go vet too, of course.

If you would like to contribute further, I'd encourage you to engage Staticcheck's issue tracker or look at vet's open issues, as they are both actively maintained. If you have an idea that doesn't fit into either of those tools, you could look at other Go linters, or write your own - these days it's fairly straightforward with go/analysis.

To help avoid confusion, I'm closing all golint before we freeze its repository. If you have any feedback, you can leave a comment on the proposal thread where it was decided to deprecate golint - though note that the proposal has been accepted for nearly a year. Thanks!