Symlinks under $GOROOT break godoc

[Dave Rolsky]

If I attempt to run `godoc -http=:6060` I get this error:

    2018/01/15 13:56:07 godoc: corpus fstree is nil

Some googling brought me to this go core bug - https://github.com/golang/go/issues/15049

On closing the bug, Russ Cox says "I think this is basically working as intended. Every time anyone tries to make godoc do more with symlinks it ends up chasing its own tail. Symlinks in Go file trees should just be disallowed, honestly."

Of course, I realize that the symlinks are there to put things where the FHS says they should be, but Go knows the one true way to do everything, and it says "don't do that". And since it's Go, not only does it say "don't do that", it breaks in the presence of it and will never be changed to work any other way.

In this case, I think getting godoc to work trumps the FHS.

I'm sure this applies to other golang-1.X packages too, but I haven't looked at them.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Conrado PLG (conradoplg)]

This also breaks the Go extension of Visual Studio Code: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-go/issues/1636#issuecomment-387962213
A tool used by it, gopkgs, uses filepath.Walk (actually a parallel implementation of it, but it's the same issue) to list the packages in GOROOT, but filepath.Walk does not follow symlinks.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Julian Alarcon (julian-alarcon)]

It is still broken on Ubuntu 22.04 (dev release) with go v1.17