[pkg-go] RFC: circular deps

Martín Ferrari tincho at tincho.org
Sun Nov 20 15:52:52 UTC 2016


Hey all,

I was today working again on x/tools, trying to solve build issues with
gccgo, and realised that now there is a circular dependency with x/text.
Similar things are happening in other very important packages.

This problem is becoming more and more serious. I don't know what is the
long term solution, but it is clear the go ecosystem is not getting any
better.

For circular deps that only happen because of tests, we can use build
profiles[0] to break cycles, but this does not solve the problem with
executables.

I thought of one possible solution, and I would like to hear feedback:
what if for these kind of troublesome repositories, we just build the
-dev package, and avoid building/testing any of the executables (or
parts of the code that pull the circular deps), and then we create a
source-less package that build-depends on all the -dev packages, and
builds/tests the executables.

What do you think?

[0] https://wiki.debian.org/BuildProfileSpec
-- 
Martín Ferrari (Tincho)



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