[Pkg-golang-devel] Bug#780355: Bug#779503: support gccgo, at least on architectures where golang is not available

[Tianon Gravi]

On 4 March 2015 at 17:54, Tianon Gravi <admwiggin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Doesn't the "go" binary support co-installability and use via the
> "-compiler" flag too?  How will that play into this proposal?

After spending some time with the gccgo-5 package in experimental
(that now has these alternatives baked in...), I'm actually more -1 on
using alternatives for this now.

The "go" implementation bundled there is not fully-baked.  For
example, using "go get" to download a project didn't bother
downloading the dependencies like it should, thus causing the build to
fail really hard with a screen-full of errors.

Worse yet, I tried building the newly-merged-upstream[1] docker gccgo
support using it, and the "go build" invocation failed to produce a
binary at the location specified by "-o", but did so with a zero exit
code indicating success, which is much more alarming.  Even adding
"-v" to the build flags didn't produce any extra output to help narrow
down the issue.

> ... claims to be compatible with Go 1.4.

In my own testing, this claim is dubious at best.  The language
support itself may be compatible (I didn't test it thoroughly enough
to say for sure), but the tooling certainly isn't yet.

(CCing #780355 because I'm even more firmly of the opinion of having
packages explicitly declare support for gccgo now than I was before)

♥,
- Tianon
  4096R / B42F 6819 007F 00F8 8E36  4FD4 036A 9C25 BF35 7DD4

[1]: https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/11298