This weekend, I made a series of somewhat unusual changes to pkgsrc.

I removed a bunch of Go packages.

Why? Because of Go modules.

What are Go modules?

Since my series of design-ish blog posts(part 1, part 2), Go module builds have fully landed in pkgsrc, to the point that they are now the preferred way to build Go packages.

To recap: There are two ways to use the go tool to build Go code.

• The old way is to have a tree, below $GOPATH, that has all the dependencies in a directory tree according to their import path. For instance, the golang.org/x/net package would be placed in a $GOPATH/src/golang.org/x/net directory. This is what lang/go/go-package.mk implements in pkgsrc.
• The new way is to extract the source code wherever you want, just like any C source. The top-level source directory contains a go.mod file that specifies dependencies and their versions. The go tool then downloads a bunch of .zip and .mod files for those dependencies and unpacks them as needed. This is similar to how Cargo works for Rust code.

Like with Rust, in pkgsrc, we specify a list of dependent module files to be downloaded from the module proxy.

In actual practice, a useful pattern has emerged, where the list of modules is in a separate file named go-modules.mk in the package directory. To create or update the file, simply run

$ make patch
$ make show-go-modules > go-modules.mk

and then .include the file from the main Makefile.

But why remove all these packages?

A pkgsrc package built with lang/go/go-module.mk does not install any source code or .a files. Only the binaries are packaged, just like for C. Go packages that just correspond to intermediate libraries and do not contain any useful binaries are simply no longer needed. They can be deleted as soon as nothing depends on them any more.

In particular, I changed all the packages depending on golang.org/x/tools to be modules, then migrated the go-tools package itself. go-tools depends on a number of other libraries that nothing else depends on.

By the way, it is fairly simple to make a non-module into a module, even if the source does not contain a go.mod:

1. Change go-package.mk to go-module.mk.
2. Run make patch and change into the top-level source directory.
3. Run go mod init github.com/foo/bar or whatever the import path is.
4. Update the file with go get and/or go mod tidy.
5. Copy the generated go.mod and go.sum files to a files directory and copy them into place in pre-patch.

Future

Some future Go release will deprecate GOPATH builds, so we must convert all Go code in pkgsrc to modules at some point. By the way, if upstream has not made the jump to modules yet, they might be happy about your pull request :)