[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.