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x/all: no obvious way to download source code #62645
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In my opinion these outdated instructions should just be removed. How to add a module as a dependency to a project is something a Go developer learns once at the beginning of their journey and it doesn't need to be repeated in every README. How to get the source code of a repository depends on where it's hosted. It shouldn't be in the README either, because the same repository can be hosted on various hosting platforms. It's the responsibility of the hosting platform to provide the user with a cloneable path or a download link. |
To be clear I'm not trying to discuss dependencies or adding of them at all. I'm talking about downloading source code, and as you said the hosting platform does not seem to provide the necessary info. The READMEs attempt to provide instructions but these instructions have been broken by the tooling changes. |
But that was the purpose of the instructions in the READMEs. It was not to tell how to get the source code, but how to make it usable as a dependency. The fact that "go get" used to download the source code into GOPATH was a side effect. In the module world you still use "go get" to make it usable as a dependency, but you need to be in a folder with a "go.mod" file. |
In this case the right thing is to fix the hosting platform, not to copy some instructions into every README, which will be wrong as soon as the repository is hosted somewhere else. |
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maybe we need to add the same notice as the main repo?
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As a usability case-study, if I want to do a VCS checkout of, say x/crypto, my process is:
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Same issue. This is extremely frustrating |
What version of Go are you using (
go version
)?Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?
Yes
What operating system and processor architecture are you using (
go env
)?go env
OutputWhat did you do?
I tried to download the source for the golang.org/x/image module.
Following the instructions in the README:
Neither the README, nor the git hosting website that golang.org/x/image redirects to provide a cloneable URL. If one tries to guess using the website URL:
Note that while I use
x/image
as an example, the majority of these modules provide non-working instructions for retrieving the source code.This lack of a canonical way to download source code has apparently been an issue since module-aware
go get
was introduced, with tracking issues coming and going with no new solution provided other than "use the typical VCS clone command". Which is OK (though a worse experience), but seemingly the Go ecosystem never adapted by providing alternate instructions. This is not typically an issue on git hosts like github, where the clone URL is prominent, but I searched for a few minutes and found no mention of a repository clone URL for any of the golang.org/x modules.What did you expect to see?
Ideally, a useable
go
command which downloads the source code, as we were all accustomed to in the pre-module days. Otherwise, simple (working) instructions for cloning these repositories, or at minimum a visible URL which can be used withgit clone
.What did you see instead?
The errors shown above.
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