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arcticicestudio / snowsaw

A lightweight, plugin-driven and dynamic dotfiles bootstrapper.
MIT License
98 stars 8 forks source link

Global tool/dependency managing with `gobin` #90

Closed arcticicestudio closed 4 years ago

arcticicestudio commented 4 years ago

In #82 and #88, two workarounds have been implemented in order to prevent the "pollution" of the project Go module file due to development tools and dependencies when installed through go get. The workaround to install modules/packages outside of the project root directory (preventing the Go toolchain to pick up the $GOMOD environment variable initialized with the path to the projects Go module file) works, but might result in problems due to already installed executables with different versions.

The general problem of tool dependencies a a long-time known issue/weak point of the current Go toolchain and is a highly rated change request from the Go community (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/25922, https://github.com/golang/go/issues/27653).

The official Go GitHub repository wiki provides a section on “How can I track tool dependencies for a module?” that describes a workaround that tracks tool dependencies through the Go module logic via a tools.go file with a dedicated tools build tag to prevent these modules to be included in production binary artifact builds. This approach works fine for non-main packages, but for CLI tools that are only implemented in the main package can not be imported in such a file.

In order to tackle this problem, a user from the community implemented gobin, an experimental, module-aware command to install/run main packages. It allows to install or run main-package commands without "polluting" the Go module file by default. It downloads modules in version-aware mode into a binary cache path within the system's cache directory (os.UserCacheDir()). It can be used to query for the path of the executable for a given module/package to simplify the usage from within Mage. It prevents problems due to already installed global binaries in $GOPATH/$GOBIN by using a cache directory instead. This keeps the system clean and ensures the correct version of a module executable is already used.

gobin is still in an early development state, but has already received a lot of positive feedback and is used in many projects. There are also many members of the core Go team that are contributing to the project and the chance is high that it will influence the official future Go toolchain implementation or might be partially ported. Also see gobin's FAQ page in the repository wiki for more details.

To finally manage the tool dependency problem for snowsaw, gobin will be integrated into the Mage build toolchain.

arcticicestudio commented 4 years ago

Resolved in #91 (ad911918bf6793bfc35a1c69e92f320b5a4f88a4)