[MetaCosm]

I agree 100% with your first point. It should be spelled out.

Your second point I am less sold on. Transitive dependencies (pkgA imports pkgB@v1 but my code need pkgB@v2 which is incompatible with v1) are the thing of nightmares in large systems development, which is what Go is designed for... that lack of versioned imports wasn't an oversight, it is a feature.

Centralized repos are centralized points of failure, and only as good as they are well managed. NPM versus CPAN if you will. Any serious project will localize dependencies, even if they are in CPAN, you never know when CPAN will be down or other unforeseen things might happen.

[prodigal_erik]

Instead what we have is that pkgA needs pkgB@then (which happens to be when the author of pkgA last cached pkgB) but my code needs pkgB@now. That's worse in pretty much every way, mostly because there are no identifiers anywhere to clearly work around or even detect the problem. I'm all for "your build can only use a single version of pkgB" (linking two versions of pkgB into the same binary is insane) but I need to say what version that is, not leave it nondeterministic and dependent on uncontrolled, unrecorded state of the machine running the build.

[tiredofcareer]

No, you just mirror CPAN. This is already done in lots of shops I know of for PyPI. IME, I've only ever had PyPI down on me once, and there are mirrors (that are usually up) if that is ever the case[0]. I think localizing dependencies as you say is a waste of time.

[0]: http://jacobian.org/writing/when-pypi-goes-down/

[kkowalczyk]

Sure, so now instead of praying that the main host won't get hacked you now should pray that none of the N mirrors will get hacked.

And if you understand the basics of probability, that's not a good scenario.

[tiredofcareer]

I do understand the basics of probability. The likelihood of your serving infrastructure or application being compromised is an order of magnitude higher than the most popular repositories in software development. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I also don't walk around worried about having an asteroid land on me simply because I understand probability. If it happens, it happens, and we deal accordingly, but using a much more difficult software engineering process because of (arguably) paranoia is silly.

[shabble]

And, that the package(s) you're trojaning aren't signed[1] (I'm not immediately sure if new releases are automagically signed/digested when uploaded via PAUSE, or what fraction of currect packages are signed)

[1] http://search.cpan.org/~dagolden/CPAN-1.94_65/lib/CPAN.pm#Cr...