> My personal theory is that what made Russ Cox cave in was his discussions with Sam Boyer. Cox thought Boyer was going down the wrong path, and thought he had a better solution.
That's certainly my understanding of the situation. Matt Farina has a great commented history of dep and vgo [0] if you haven't already seen it. The comments are particularly enlightening.
Still, it's not clear to me what made the Go team get into the package management game at all. As you say, for years they were happy to leave that as a community problem. But something spurred them to declare that Dep was an "official experiment."
> Dep is okay when it works, but inherits pretty much all the warts of Glide, which Boyer also worked on.
Funny, I've had exactly the opposite experience. Glide caused us plenty of trouble at CockroachDB, but Dep has worked flawlessly, if slowly. I've also found Sam to be exceptionally friendly and responsive to feedback [1] [2].
Indeed, as I said, Dep is okay when it works, until it doesn't. This [1], for example, is a blocking issue, and requires some manual editing of the lock file to get around. I've had other issues. The issues pale in comparison to the horribleness of Glide, but it's interesting just how these tools end up being so damn flaky.
Ah, that is an unfortunate issue, and the error message is unreadable to boot.
> The issues pale in comparison to the horribleness of Glide, but it's interesting just how these tools end up being so damn flaky.
That's the crux of it, isn't it? The dozens of Go package managers that have come and gone over the years have provided us with substantial evidence that building a stable package manager requires several years of development. I think that's why I'm frustrated that the Go team hit the reset button again. Dep has accumulated plenty of bug fixes over the years to handle more and more of these edge cases, but vgo had to start from scratch.
Not only buggy, theses tools didn't follow the simplicity that we like in Go. For example gb was more in the Go philosophy for my taste. I was surprise that it was not chosen as the official experiment.
That's certainly my understanding of the situation. Matt Farina has a great commented history of dep and vgo [0] if you haven't already seen it. The comments are particularly enlightening.
Still, it's not clear to me what made the Go team get into the package management game at all. As you say, for years they were happy to leave that as a community problem. But something spurred them to declare that Dep was an "official experiment."
> Dep is okay when it works, but inherits pretty much all the warts of Glide, which Boyer also worked on.
Funny, I've had exactly the opposite experience. Glide caused us plenty of trouble at CockroachDB, but Dep has worked flawlessly, if slowly. I've also found Sam to be exceptionally friendly and responsive to feedback [1] [2].
[0]: https://codeengineered.com/blog/2018/golang-godep-to-vgo/#co...
[1]: https://github.com/golang/dep/issues/1927
[2]: https://github.com/golang/dep/issues/460