Leading dash invalid in test filename inside module

[Ben Hoyt]

(I wasn't quite sure whether golang-nuts or golang-dev was the best place for this -- sending to golang-nuts for now.)

I just released a new version of GoAWK (v1.8.0) using Go version 1.17, and then tested installing it using "go install". However, go install complains with the following:

$ go install github.com/benhoyt/goawk@latest
go: downloading github.com/benhoyt/goawk v1.8.0
go install: github.com/benhoyt/goawk@latest: github.com/benhoyt/go...@v1.8.0: verifying module: github.com/benhoyt/go...@v1.8.0: reading https://sum.golang.org/lookup/github.com/benhoyt/go...@v1.8.0: 410 Gone
server response: not found: create zip: -ftest: malformed file path "-ftest": leading dash

Sure enough, I had a file in the repo's top-level directory called "-ftest" (the "-" is a regular ASCII hyphen or "dash"). This file was used in tests, to test whether the program's command line handling distinguished flags from file names correctly.

It looks like this error is coming from Go's module code, in the checkPath function: https://cs.opensource.google/go/x/mod/+/refs/tags/v0.5.0:module/module.go;l=397

However, the module docs on file naming constraints don't seem to mention this constraint: https://golang.org/ref/mod#zip-path-size-constraints

"File and directory names within a module may consist of Unicode letters, ASCII digits, the ASCII space character (U+0020), and the ASCII punctuation characters !#$%&()+,-.=@[]^_{}~. Note that package paths may not contain all these characters. See module.CheckFilePath and module.CheckImportPath for the differences."

I checked the module.CheckFilePath and module.CheckImportPath doc comments, and they don't seem to mention a leading dash being a problem, either. The /ref/mod doc *does* say that for module paths, "The leading path element ... must contain at least one dot and cannot start with a dash." However, this is stated only for module paths, not for general file paths.

I noticed a related issue (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/45447) and change (https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/mod/+/316629/) for "embed" that looks like it would fix this issue -- the code now only does this "leading dash" check for file paths, not import paths.

However, the "leading dash" error is a server response, so I suspect the code running on Google's servers is not running Go 1.17 and doesn't have this fix.

Will this just fix itself after Google compiles the server with Go 1.17? Or is another fix required, even if it's just mentioning that constraint in the docs?

-Ben

[Jay Conrod]

You're exactly right, the proxy is still in the process of migrating to Go 1.17. It should be done in the next day or two, at which point it should be able to fetch this version.

In the mean time, you can work around it by setting GOPRIVATE=github.com/benhoyt/goawk, which tells the go command to fetch that module directly from vcs and not to contact GOSUMDB for it.

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[Ben Hoyt]

Awesome, thanks. At a previous company, we used to take months/years to upgrade to a new Go version, so it's nice that you guys are eating your own dog food so quickly. :-)

For now, I've removed the leading-dash test file and released a new patch version. When I reinstate it I may end up putting that file in a subdirectory in any case, just because it's weird to have a file named "-ftest" in the repo's root.

-Ben