A friendly heads-up: Deletion of Go1.4-dependent code in x/tools repo

[Robert Griesemer]

If you don't depend on x/tools packages building against Go 1.4 you can stop reading now.

Go 1.6 was released on February 17, 2016. One month later, starting March17, golang.org/x/tools repository will no longer build with Go 1.4, and we will delete the following golang.org/x/tools packages:

  go/exact

  go/gccgoimporter

  go/gcimporter

  go/importer

  go/types

With the exception of go/importer, which was an experimental prototype, equivalent packages are now included in the standard library (golang.org/x/tools/go/exact was renamed go/constant) .

After March 17, you must use Go version 1.5 or later to build x/tools packages depending on go/types, or maintain your own "vendored" copy of the current contents of the golang.org/x/tools repository.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-announce/qu_rAphYdxY outlined this plan in October last year.

Comments, feedback on this thread, please.

- gri, for the Go team

[Russ Cox]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 5:53 AM, Konstantin Shaposhnikov <k.shapo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Will cmd/vet be deleted as well?

I've seen quite a lot of projects that use Go 1.4 and "go get" vet from the x/tools repository during the build.

Since it depends on those, yes, it will.

Go 1.4 stopped being supported when Go 1.5 was released six months ago. (See https://golang.org/doc/devel/release.html#policy for details.)

Because we knew this deletion would affect use cases such as the one you mentioned, we waited an extra six months (one release cycle) to give users additional time to update, and we pre-announced the change in October (see Robert's original email for the link). That's a significant grace period with significant advance notice.

We can't keep the code running indefinitely. People who need to keep running Go 1.4 can in the worst case make their own copy of the code, but we'd also love to hear from them about why they're still on Go 1.4 so that we can address those reasons.

Thanks.

Russ

[Russ Cox]

[bcc golang-announce to move future replies off, sorry]