[pkg-golang-devel] Bug#818415: golang: move to per-Go-major version coinstallable packages

[Michael Hudson-Doyle]

Source: golang
Version: 2:1.6-1
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

To make maintenance of Go easier in the future, it would be good to allow major
versions of Go to be co-installed (like gcc-4.9, gcc-5, etc). The plan goes
something like this:

 1) convert existing golang source package to golang-1.6 source package,
    removing version independent things like the man pages and management of
    /usr/bin/go, changed to install to version dependent paths (/usr/lib/go-1.6
    etc)

 2) create a golang-defaults package that contains this version independent
    stuff and links /usr/bin/go to the appropriate version

 3) update gccgo-5 and gccgo-6 packages to stop providing an alternative for
    'go'.

The motivation for this is to allow us to upload pre-release versions of Go
without making them the default, to be more compatible with an externl
(possibly Google-hosted) archive that provides newer versions of Go and, if
necessary, to allow us to make newer versions of Go available to stable
releases without having to conflict with the version of Go in that release.

I have prepared packages for Ubuntu that implement this which can be found at

https://git.launchpad.net/~mwhudson/ubuntu/+source/golang/+git/xenial/log/?h=ubuntu-xenial-coinstallability-2

and

https://git.launchpad.net/~mwhudson/+git/golang-defaults

They're mostly appropriate for Debian, although not entirely. The changes
required are simple.

Cheers,
mwh

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers wily-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'wily-updates'), (500, 'wily-security'), (500, 'wily'), (100, 'wily-backports')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.2.0-34-generic (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_NZ.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

-- no debconf information