Glide: installed-command dependencies

[tamird]

Does glide support the notion of "my project requires stringer", please go install it for me?

See https://github.com/constabulary/gb/issues/100 for a similar feature request.

[mattfarina]

It does not have that feature at the moment. Currently, something like a Makefile is used for that. But, make is not cross platform.

Glide projects are inside the GOPATH meaning installed binaries are inside GOPATH/bin. Do you think versioning needs to be apart of fetching binaries like this? If so, how does that work in a multi-project world where there could be different versions?

Toying with the idea of a bin or _bin directory inside a project feels like a hack. Not to say it's not a good solution (you see it in other programming language projects).

Because this can be used by go:generate we should figure this out.

[tamird]

I think having a bin directory inside of vendor is the way to go; it's going to require that users add ./vendor/bin to their PATH, but it's the path of least friction and the only reasonable way to proceed

[mattfarina]

@tamird the problem with that is the vendor/ directory is a part of the go tool. Adding a _bin_ directory to that would be to deviate from the built in behavior.

[tamird]

I thought the go tool was only aware of vendor/ to the extent that it will look for imports in there, but never writes anything into that directory. What's the harm, then, in adding vendor/bin?

I suppose there is a slight danger of conflict with a package that has an import path starting with bin/, but that seems unlikely, and can be alleviated with the use of a different top-level directory (after appropriate bikeshedding).

[pyros2097]

What about having a scripts declaration like npm and then do a glide run errcheck and I suppose it would look like this

package: github.com/Masterminds/glide
scripts:
- name: "errcheck" 
  cmd: "go run vendor/github.com/kisielk/errcheck/main.go"

Then you wouldn't need a bin directory and don't need to use makefiles but of course it would be slow running those commands since they need to be compiled and its a bit verbose.
Even if its not used for this use case I think some scripting functionality is necessary for glide and this would be cross platform.
Hulk Smash! :hurtrealbad:

[tamird]

@mattfarina by the way, the readme says that glide installs dependencies with go install, but that doesn't seem to be the case - at least not for subpackages. If glide install would go install each subpackage, that would adequately resolve this issue for me.

[mattfarina]

@tamird glide install isn't a direct corollary to go install. This is likely part of the confusion. It's more akin to the install commands in other dependency managers.

I'm thinking about this request though.