On 16 March 2016 at 15:13, Michael Hudson-Doyle <michael.hud...@canonical.com> wrote: > To make maintenance of Go easier in the future, it would be good to allow > major > versions of Go to be co-installed (like gcc-4.9, gcc-5, etc). The plan goes > something like this: > > 1) convert existing golang source package to golang-1.6 source package, > removing version independent things like the man pages and management of > /usr/bin/go, changed to install to version dependent paths > (/usr/lib/go-1.6 > etc) > > 2) create a golang-defaults package that contains this version independent > stuff and links /usr/bin/go to the appropriate version > > 3) update gccgo-5 and gccgo-6 packages to stop providing an alternative for > 'go'. > > The motivation for this is to allow us to upload pre-release versions of Go > without making them the default, to be more compatible with an externl > (possibly Google-hosted) archive that provides newer versions of Go and, if > necessary, to allow us to make newer versions of Go available to stable > releases without having to conflict with the version of Go in that release. > > I have prepared packages for Ubuntu that implement this which can be found at > > https://git.launchpad.net/~mwhudson/ubuntu/+source/golang/+git/xenial/log/?h=ubuntu-xenial-coinstallability-2 > > and > > https://git.launchpad.net/~mwhudson/+git/golang-defaults > > They're mostly appropriate for Debian, although not entirely. The changes > required are simple.
You've done a lot of great work here, Michael! :D We've discussed this a bit here and there, but I'd like to formally say I've been swayed to be +1 on this -- the maintenance burden will be slightly higher, but it allows us to do other interesting things like put "Go tip" into a repo without breaking other unrelated things, or have backports of newer Go versions without causing as many potential rebuild oddities. I agree that where you've got those packages sitting now looks pretty good, and that moving forward makes sense! Thanks for raising the discussion and moving it forward. ♥, - Tianon 4096R / B42F 6819 007F 00F8 8E36 4FD4 036A 9C25 BF35 7DD4
