[mfer]

You are absolutely right about solver strategies. Most of the existing package managers in Go have no solver. It's all manual and typically the tip of master or latest commit.

Glide has a dumb solver in that it goes with the first best version it finds. It will tell you if there is a later conflict that you can manually resolve.

There is a package, discussed here called gps, that is being prepped to merge into Glide. This solver has a back-off strategy. It's loosely based on the solver in dart. The idea is to find the latest newest version that works for the complete tree.

We've been incrementally working to get a good solver and are almost there.