&gt; The Go maintainers have conflated what a library is and where a library is. That&#x27;s an important distinction that should not be glossed over like this.<p>I think this depends on whether GitHub treats URLs as <i>just</i> URLs, or more generally as URIs.  Based on their documentation [0], they refer to them as URIs, which means they are intended to represent both Location and Identity [1].  The domain represents the &quot;where&quot;, the repository path is the &quot;what&quot;.<p>They should be able to change their URL schema relatively easily, by including the appropriate redirects - a mapping from the old schema to the new.  Which is exactly the strategy they discuss in the HTTP Redirects section.<p>(edit) Formatting<p>[0] : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Uniform_Resource_Identifier" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Uniform_Resource_Identifier</a><p>[1] : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.github.com&#x2F;v3&#x2F;#http-redirects" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.github.com&#x2F;v3&#x2F;#http-redirects</a>