A response about dep and vgo
Vgo has certainly been a disaster from a communication and community point of view.  From an outsider perspective, it looks like a case of maintainer arrogance, and it <i>is</i> hard to believe that Go really has needs that are significantly different from those of e.g. Rust or Java.<p>However, I am also in the unusual position that I had to design and implement a package manager for my own little language recently.  My original hunch was to just create a Cargo clone, but after reading Russ Cox&#x27;s writings, I ended up cloning vgo (with a few simplifications).  The implementation was wonderfully simple - everything just fit together.  The algorithms are trivial.  Operationally, it is easy to understand what the package manager is doing (even more so than for vgo, as vgo has do deal with various Go idiosyncracies and backwards compatibility).<p>This is in stark contrast to my experience with other package managers, which are temperamental beasts at the best of times.  When they work, everything&#x27;s groovy, but their error modes are easily incomprehensible.  I think vgo&#x27;s approach of restricting expressivity and streamlining processes is the right one.  But since nobody has used such a package manager before, it remains to be seen whether it works in practice.<p>For my own experiment, I do have one data point: I showed people the (rather brief) documentation for my vgo-inspired package manager, and they all felt it was very simple to follow and easy understand what it did, and how.