Russ Cox on Go dependency management
I absolutely love writing programs in Go and at my current startup we&#x27;re basing all our core backend infrastructure on it.<p>One thing that I find extremely troubling about Go&#x27;s dependency handling though (and which at least partly contributes to people&#x27;s frustration I think) is the mixing of the concepts of a namespace and a resource identifier in Go&#x27;s package names. It&#x27;s absolutely reasonable that package names should be unique, making the package name double as a storage location is not always a good idea though (IMHO): For example, we recently switched from using gitlab.com to our own private Gitlab instance, which runs under a custom (non-publicly resolvable) domain. Since all our packages were named like &quot;gitlab.com&#x2F;...&#x2F;...&quot; (to make them &quot;go get&quot;-table) we would have to rename all of them to make them &quot;go get&quot;-table from the new location. In the end we solved it by defining a git URL rewriting rule that rewrites the old to the new URL when fetching the repository. This ensured that we could work primarily on our new Gitlab server while maintaining the possiblity to build packages on the gitlab.com server. While that works I think it would have been a better idea to keep package names and storage locations separate, or at least give users a way to override&#x2F;modify the resolution of packages into locations using a more standardized approach: Such a mechanism could then allow for different name resolution strategies (like a package file, a list of standard repositories) while falling back to the standard way of resolving packages into URLs for &quot;go get&quot;. Granted, this would add another layer of complexity, but as we already need a separate file for proper vendoring (to e.g. specify versions) it wouldn&#x27;t hurt too much to also put (optional) information about storage locations into that file.<p>Just my 2 cents, apart from this minor inconvenience I&#x27;m absolutely happy with Go and its ecosystem!