Dep: The meaning of "gps"

[knweiss]

Browsing the dep repo I noticed that the abbreviation "gps" is used a lot but not explained.

I found the explanation in the README.md of https://github.com/sdboyer/gps:

gps is the Go Packaging Solver. It is an engine for tackling dependency management problems in Go. It is trivial - about 35 lines of code - to replicate the fetching bits of go get using gps.

gps is _not_ Yet Another Go Package Management Tool. Rather, it's a library that package management (and adjacent) tools can use to solve the hard parts of the problem in a consistent, holistic way. It is a distillation of the ideas behind language package managers like bundler, npm, elm-package, cargo (and others) into a library, artisanally handcrafted with ❤️ for Go's specific requirements.

[sdboyer]

yep, that's what it refers to!

in general we've tried to avoid references to it in actual documentation, because it's an implementation detail that most users don't need to care about.

I never got around to porting that README over when we merged gps. if you've a suggestion about where you think it makes sense to define the term in the context of our current docs, I'm open to suggestions 😊

[knweiss]

In that case my suggestion is to add an one-line godoc comment above each package gps source line:

// gps (Go Packaging Solver) is a dependency management engine.
package gps

...and also change this line in MAINTAINERS.md:

-* gps
+* gps (Go Packaging Solver)