Some notes on keeping up with Go packages and commands
Bearing in mind that just go get
'ing things is a bad way to
remember what packages you're interested in,
it can be useful to keep an eye on updates to Go packages and
commands. My primary tool for this is Dmitri Shuralyov's
Go-Package-Store,
which lets you keep an eye on not only what stuff in $GOPATH/src
has
updates but what they are. However, there are a few usage notes that
I've accumulated.
The first and most important thing to know about Go-Package-Store,
and something that I only realized recently myself (oh the
embarrassment) is that Go-Package-Store does not rebuild packages
or commands. All it does is download new versions (including
fetching and updating their dependencies). You can see this in the
commands it's running if you pay attention, since it specifically
runs 'go get -u -d
'. This decision is sensible and basically
necessary, since many commands and (sub) packages aren't installed
with 'go get <repo top level>
', but it does mean that you're going
to have to do this yourself when you want to.
So, the first thing this implies is that you need to keep track of
the go get
command to rebuild each command in $GOPATH/bin
that
you care about; otherwise, sooner or later you'll be staring at a
program in $GOPATH/bin
and resorting to web searches to find out
what repository it came from and how it's built. I suggest just
putting this information in a simple shell script that just does a
mass rebuild, with one 'go get
' per line; when I want to rebuild
just a specific command, I cut and paste its line.
(Really keen people will turn the text file into a script so that
you can do things like 'rebuild <command>
' to run the right 'go
get
' to rebuild the given command.)
The next potentially tricky area is dependent packages, in several
ways. The obvious thing is that having G-P-S update a dependent
package doesn't in any way tell you that you should rebuild the
command that uses it; in fact G-P-S doesn't particularly know what
uses what package. The easy but bruce force way to deal with this
is just to rebuild all commands every so often (well, run 'go get
-u
' against them, I'm not sure how much Make-like dependency
checking it does).
The next issue is package growth. What I've noticed over time is
that using G-P-S winds up with me having extra packages that aren't
needed by the commands (and packages) that I have installed. As a
result I both pay attention to what packages G-P-S is presenting
updates for and periodically look through $GOPATH/src
for packages
that make me go 'huh?'. Out of place packages get deleted instead
of updated, on the grounds that if they're actual dependencies of
something I care about they'll get re-fetched when I rebuild commands.
(I also delete $GOPATH/pkg/*
every so often. One reason that all
of this rebuilding doesn't bother me very much is that I track the
development version of Go itself, so I actively want to periodically
rebuild everything with the latest compiler. People with big code
bases and stable compilers may not be so sanguine about routinely
deleting compiled packages and so on.)
I think that an explicit 'go get -u
' of commands and packages
that you care about will reliably rebuild dependent packages that
have been updated but not (re)built in the past by Go-Package-Store,
but I admit that I sometimes resort to brute force (ie deleting
$GOPATH/pkg/*
) just to be sure. Go things build very fast and I'm
not building big things, so my attitude is 'why not?'.
Sidebar: Where I think the extra packages come from
This is only a theory. I haven't tested it directly; it's just the only cause I can think of.
Suppose you have a command that imports a sub-package from a
repository. When you 'go get
' the command, I believe that Go only
fetches the further imported dependencies of the sub-package itself.
Now, later on Go-Package-Store comes along, reports that the
repository is out of date, and when you tell it to update things
it does a 'go get
' on the entire repository (not just the sub-package
initially used by the command). This full-repo 'go get
' presumably
imports either all dependencies used in the repository or all
dependencies of the code in the top level of the repository (I'm
not sure which), which may well add extra dependencies over what
the sub-package needed.
(The other possible cause is shifting dependencies in packages that I use directly, but some stray packages are so persistent in their periodic returns that I don't really believe that.)
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