proposal: ship packaged debian bianaries along with tarballs

[maddsua]

Proposal Details

Rationale: it would be really nice if we could simply install the latest version of go from a .deb file.

Of course, golang is available via the official debian repo, however the versions there aren't the most recent, and in my experience you don't really update compilers/dev tooling too frequently. But once in a while you want to get new features or something along those lines, and that's when most of the time you realize that the repo still has an old stable version without those wanted things in it.

Having a .deb file available for download along with the binary tarballs would allow one to simply download a never version once in a while and just apt install it.

Having apt manage the installation is also nice since you could simply install go to /usr/bin and let the package manager handle copying files or their removal. This also lets us avoid having to modify the $PATH variable.

[seankhliao]

Debian packaging is best left to the Debian maintainers.

[maddsua]

Well it was fast, I guess I'd have to do it myself 🤷

[dagood]

For what it's worth, I will sometimes use an old distro package to get set up, then use https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/dl (https://go.dev/doc/manage-install) for more specific versions. No need to manage PATH or change the environment to swap versions, because each one gets its own entrypoint program. (I will sometimes symlink a recent version in something like ~/bin for convenience, though.)

https://go.dev/doc/toolchain is another tool that's available to automatically get a Go version that's recommended for developing on a specific project (because it has certain features, etc.)

Ultimately, Go is also relatively easy to build from source, especially if you have an existing build of Go to use as a bootstrap.

Recommendations like this are probably not on topic... (https://go.dev/wiki/Questions) but I would hate for you to miss out. 😅

[thediveo]

Well it was fast, I guess I'd have to do it myself 🤷

maybe devcontainers might be something for you then, and maybe any of your co-workers? Microsoft has a well maintained "go" feature for devcontainers that does the magic of installing from upstream.

sometimes I cannot but reckon that Debian and Co. are the reason that we now have containers and devcontainers, not that Debian really understands what is happening...