create official releases? about gofumpt

[mvdan]

This issue covers multiple topics. The first is tagged versions; are these really necessary? With Go modules, you can easily pin to a v0 pseudo-version. For example, the command below pins to the latest commit from master:

go get mvdan.cc/[email protected]

You can figure out what the latest pseudo-version is with a command like go get -json mvdan.cc/gofumpt. You can also use go list -f '{{.Module.Version}}' mvdan.cc/gofumpt, which will directly print the version string alone.

The second bit of the issue is about fancy releases with tarballs and all the extras. I expect any gofumpt user to also have Go installed, so I think a go get command is the right way to install the tool. I've also reasoned above that I don't think semver releases are necessary at this point, so I'm not sure that there's anything I should do here.

[twpayne]

An advantage of a fancy release with tarballs is that you get a pre-built binary which is much faster to install than downloading all the source code and rebuilding from zero. It's also more robust as you only need GitHub to be up, not all the infrastructure required to download everything in gofumpt's dependency graph. See golangci-lint's install instructions for an example.

[mvdan]

With proxy.golang.org being live, it can be relied on for "robust" downloads :)

A build from zero should also take mere seconds on most machines, so I'm not sure if we're solving a real problem.

As a side point - the install instructions you link to follow a curl ... | sh pattern, which I don't think should be recommended. go get ... can't run arbitrary code, at least.

I appreciate your input here, by the way - I'm just not convinced that all this extra machinery makes sense for small projects. Particularly those which are Go tools, where the users are developers well familiar with go get.

[mvdan]

I think this is a bit overkill right now. If the Go proxy and module version pinning don't work, please let me know and we can consider reopening. Thanks!