[atombender]

The Go team, for years, actually insisted that package management was something the Go community had to go and figure out. As you say, Google uses a monorepo where they check everything into a single tree. One of the core Go developers -- I forget who, unfortunately -- actually claimed at one point that they didn't want to design a package management system because they didn't know how; since Google used a monorepo, designing a real package management system not based on a monorepo would apparently be beyond them.

My personal theory is that what made Russ Cox cave in was his discussions with Sam Boyer. Cox thought Boyer was going down the wrong path, and thought he had a better solution. Unfortunately, the Go community didn't seem to have read the discussions the two were having, because pretty much everyone thought Dep (Boyer's tool) was blessed by the Go team and was going to be the official package management tool. I can forgive the drama of the end result is a real, non-Google package management system, though.

(While I didn't appreciate the drama, I'm somewhat relieved Dep is not going to be the official solution. Dep is okay when it works, but inherits pretty much all the warts of Glide, which Boyer also worked on. Glide has been an absolute nightmare to work with. Dep is in fact worse than Glide in some respects -- due to weaknesses in its solver, it's completely incompatible with certain significant community packages such as the Kubernetes client. Of course, Dep is not yet 1.0, but I would not say things were looking that promising.)

[benesch]

> My personal theory is that what made Russ Cox cave in was his discussions with Sam Boyer. Cox thought Boyer was going down the wrong path, and thought he had a better solution.

That's certainly my understanding of the situation. Matt Farina has a great commented history of dep and vgo [0] if you haven't already seen it. The comments are particularly enlightening.

Still, it's not clear to me what made the Go team get into the package management game at all. As you say, for years they were happy to leave that as a community problem. But something spurred them to declare that Dep was an "official experiment."

> Dep is okay when it works, but inherits pretty much all the warts of Glide, which Boyer also worked on.

Funny, I've had exactly the opposite experience. Glide caused us plenty of trouble at CockroachDB, but Dep has worked flawlessly, if slowly. I've also found Sam to be exceptionally friendly and responsive to feedback [1] [2].

[0]: https://codeengineered.com/blog/2018/golang-godep-to-vgo/#co...

[1]: https://github.com/golang/dep/issues/1927

[2]: https://github.com/golang/dep/issues/460

[atombender]

Indeed, as I said, Dep is okay when it works, until it doesn't. This [1], for example, is a blocking issue, and requires some manual editing of the lock file to get around. I've had other issues. The issues pale in comparison to the horribleness of Glide, but it's interesting just how these tools end up being so damn flaky.

[1] https://github.com/golang/dep/issues/1207

[benesch]

Ah, that is an unfortunate issue, and the error message is unreadable to boot.

> The issues pale in comparison to the horribleness of Glide, but it's interesting just how these tools end up being so damn flaky.

That's the crux of it, isn't it? The dozens of Go package managers that have come and gone over the years have provided us with substantial evidence that building a stable package manager requires several years of development. I think that's why I'm frustrated that the Go team hit the reset button again. Dep has accumulated plenty of bug fixes over the years to handle more and more of these edge cases, but vgo had to start from scratch.

On the bright side, vgo essentially can't fail.

[kaeshiwaza]

Not only buggy, theses tools didn't follow the simplicity that we like in Go. For example gb was more in the Go philosophy for my taste. I was surprise that it was not chosen as the official experiment.

[akavel]

Personally, I actually never thought Dep was blessed by the Go team to the point that it "was going to be official". So I wouldn't be so fast to say "pretty much everyone". Notably, some loud people "thought" so; I've noticed that many quiet people quietly did not (as can be seen e.g. by the numerous voiced agreements and endorsements of the vgo prototype on the mailing list). Again, I personally expected exactly something similar to what was pulled off in the end to happen. Especially given that whenever somebody started claiming Dep "is going to be official", rsc/rob (don't remember) seemed fast to correct that it's not so, and that it's only an official experiment. Even Sam, after AFAIR being corrected so, was seemingly careful to say only about an official experiment in public emails, readme, etc.

I have numerous thoughts about developments like this one. Mostly, that I've seen a similar situation happen in numerous communities already, Go totally not being the first nor the last one, that the steering commitee have the last say, and may have different taste. I learnt to accept that their choice usually does have merit and usually actually ends for the better. I learnt that it requires a lot of humbleness and sometimes gritting one's teeth, learning to let go of hurt feelings, and accepting that someone else may have reasons you still need to grow to understand. Personally, my own view is that for Sam, this was probably the first time something like this happened, and he wasn't prepared for the hit. And I agree those never stop tasting bitter, given the work one has put in a project of this kind. A good will, hard contribution, being de facto rejected in the end. A child being "lost". But that's not the whole truth, because the child is in this case reborn, though in somewhat different shape. The experiment has served its purpose and brought a lot of value, a significant contribution. On the other hand, I do sometimes wonder, can such situations and misunderstandings be avoided somehow? Or is the world just not perfect enough? And by the way, I also think that Russ was actually taken by surprise by the extent of the reaction. I suppose that's why it took him so long to react, which let the situation and complains get somewhat louder than necessary.

But that's too just my personal opinion. One of many in this somewhat unfortunate situation. I just wanted to also let my steam off in the end, starting to grow more and more tired of the recurring claims that "everybody is surprised". On the contrary, I'm personally one of the people looking forward to vgo, and strongly unconvinced by what dep has become.

[atombender]

What impression you had probably depends on whether you read the Go mailing lists or not. All of my colleagues, myself included, had gotten the impression, who knows how, that Dep was official. We don't follow the Go lists.

The Dep situation is very similar to that of Eric S. Raymond's attempt at replacing the Linux kernel's config tool. Instead of presenting a design proposal and discussing it in public, he pretty much finished the project on his own, perhaps thinking that a working version would lead to adoption by users and thus forcing the kernel team to accept something users liked. Or perhaps he assumed he had clout in the Linux community, which of course he didn't. Either way, this kind of brute-forcing just leads to wasted work and resentment.

[akavel]

That's a very interesting reply for me, thanks. Reflecting on it, actually I don't really follow the list either nowadays, due to not enough time. But I feel I kinda do know the “who's who” of the community, and thus I sometimes just glance through some threads (e.g. on HN) looking only for what did a core member of the Go team say. Recently, I repeatedly feel it's important to quickly find out who's the “important people with power” in an online tech forum. I don’t want this to sound as some kind of a critique; just trying to put down how I believe I came to the conclusion I expressed in the above comment, to try and better understand it for myself.