[pmahoney]

> Even better, it lets use very easily drop into those dependencies and add minor changes or debugging lines if you need to.

I've done this quite a bit with typical Ruby+bundler setups. I think the key is that both Go and Ruby start from source code, vs. something like Java where your dependencies are compiled JARs without source (of course, there is infrastructure to enable easy fetching of the source when available).

This is similar to my experience with Nix package manager. It's purely source-based with binary packages seen as something like a compiler cache. It's easy to get the source to a package, make some tweaks, and build (and use) a custom version (at least I personally have found it far easier than Debian, even with apt making it easy to get the source).