[cybrexalpha]

It does a lot well. For example it correctly pins dependencies by hash in go.sum. It's by no means the worst dependency management system I've ever used.

IMO the biggest miss with Go modules is conflating the identity of a dependency with how you get it. This means that renaming a repo not only breaks the module itself (as you self-import other modules in the same source tree using the full path), but all of your dependencies. I've seen repos be renamed from github.com/foo/proj to github.com/bar/proj as part of organisational reshuffles, and then there's a big warning somewhere that says "never make a github.com/foo/proj repo or it'll break GitHub's automatic forwarding for renamed repos, and you'll break every package that depends on us."

There are workarounds like using replace directives. But that makes an even worse situation where you can read a source file and assume a dependency is at github.com/foo/proj but actually it's elsewhere. But ultimately a real fix involves touching every single file that imports your dependency. If Go modules left the way of pulling a dependency in go.mod alone it wouldn't.

You should use a Go modules proxy to solve this, and a custom import path. But by the time most orgs realise they need this it's too late and adopting one would be a huge change. So you end up with a patchwork of import issues.

[icholy]

> But ultimately a real fix involves touching every single file that imports your dependency.

Why is that a problem?

[cybrexalpha]

For an internal-only dependency it's possible. But if you've got a lot of active branches, or long-lived feature branches, it'll create chaos in merge conflicts. Even worse if you've got multiple supported versions of a product on release branches (e.g., `main-v1.0`, `main-v1.1`, `main-v1.2`, and `main` itself for the yet-to-be-released `v1.3`) you either make backports awful (by only changing the import path on `main`) or have to change even more things (by changing the import path on the release branches too).

It's effectively impossible for pubic-facing dependencies. Imagine if https://github.com/sirupsen/logrus wanted to change their Go modules import path, for example to move to another git hosting provider. (Logrus is great by the way, I'm only 'picking' on it as a popular Go library that's used everywhere.) GitHub tells me that almost 200,000 Go projects depend on it (https://github.com/sirupsen/logrus/network/dependents), so all of them would need to change every source file they do logging in (probably most of them) in order to handle that.

GitHub seems like it's going to be eternal for now, but when the industry moves on in 10 years time every single Go project is going to break. This would be a problem for any source dependency management solution of course, it's not like any of the others are immune to this issue. But because Go has you encode the Git path in every source file you import it into, the level of change to fix it is an order of magnitude higher.

[icholy]

> GitHub seems like it's going to be eternal for now, but when the industry moves on in 10 years time every single Go project is going to break.

This isn't correct. The Go module proxy stores all of the module content so it's still available even if the original source is removed.