Yeah, I agree it isn't the most elegant way to do it, but the alternative is to keep a copy of go's http package in the gocouch repo, which isn't too elegant either.

My guess is that within a couple months Go will have a new http client that's fully-featured (keep-alive requests, authentication, and support for generic requests). Until then, if people have a burning need to use gocouch, they'll have to add that small method to the http package. Plus, people are used to compiling the go source code because it's the only way to install it (no binary packages yet)