Comment 34 for bug 1267393

We've had extensive conversations on this topic elsewhere, and these were pretty much entirely covered in Jamie's comment #27, which does an excellent job describing the various perspectives for the same problems. Thanks for that Jamie.

Just a couple of points that might be useful to add:

[Jamie]
> If we do this with golang-gc (gccgo would follow established update procedures),
> then right away if there is a security update or SRU in golang-foo-dev, we can
> do 'reverse-depends -b golang-foo-dev' to see what needs no change rebuilds.

As an obvious point yet perhaps worth raising, a bug in a library doesn't necessarily mean everything has to be rebuilt.

[Steve]
> My biggest concern here is that making golang-go genuinely supportable in the distro context means
> supporting dynamic linking, and the Go upstream community appears to be quite hostile to the
> principle of dynamic linking.

That sounds like an overstatement. It is true that the Go community appreciates static linkage, and some members have public sayings about how dynamic linkage has its own issues, neither the Go community nor the Go core development team (most important in this case) is not hostile to dynamic linking.

Here is evidence showing progress rather than hostility:

https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=256

http://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=885321ad387328c16c6f69fb04b12ac69b69b691
http://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=c9e8491bbfcee7a9c05934f8be0718bccbf29aec
http://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=98034d036d03213807879975629172945169c7c8
http://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=1eadf11dd1b7b19d4857681363553c2cfd2ad47d