Go and the Insanity of Import Paths
Today I got back on creating my own linux distribution. I am using gentoo as a base for creating a binary distribution that is built from my current gentoo configuration.
As a start I am trying to host a portage binhost that serves prebuilt gentoo packages. I was searching for a light http server that can create a directory listing (for /usr/portage/packages, /etc/portage, etc.) with an optional .tar.gz download link to download the whole directory. I found jpillora/serve which is an awesome project that does exactly what I need.
I found the default listing a bit confusing as the sorting of directories and files was case sensitive. I forked the project and tried to implement a commandline flag that makes sorting case insensitive.
After a couple of minutes I knew what to change in the source code and tried to adjust it to my needs. I compiled the source and ran it… But nothing changed. I added prints and commented out a whole lot of the original source… But still, the code was working as if I haven’t changed anything! Then I realized that changes to the main.go file are reflected to the go run . command. This was the point where I really started to question my sanity! From my point of view the main.go file was the only file that could be changed in the project. Until now I have not encountered a single compiler error!!
After asking a friend of mine for help (@jwuensche) I realized that I did the mistake of running go get github.com/fin-ger/serve instead of adding a new remote to github.com/jpillora/serve. All import paths in the project were pointing to github.com/jpillora/serve/... which lead to not importing my code from the github.com/fin-ger/serve/main.go but including the packages from the original author.
After some search I realized that this is actually common practice in go! This is the way to import local relative sub-packages… This actually drives my fork of the project useless as you cannot go get it anymore and use it e.g. as a replacement until my pull request is accepted on upstream. I found no solution to this problem. It seems like this is just accepted as “common practice”.
I mean… WHAT THE FUCK??!??!????