Not Go at least. You misunderstood the post completely.
Here is an example of how you are supposed to change the import path for subsequent major versions (that is, backwards incompatible versions): https://github.com/jackc/pgx/blob/3599f646293c1b0d381214ab26...
A one-line change to your modfile and the import path is changed.
$ go get github.com/linkedin/goavro@v1.0.5
$ go get github.com/linkedin/goavro/v2@v2.10.1
$ go list -m ... | grep goavro
github.com/linkedin/goavro v1.0.5
github.com/linkedin/goavro/v2 v2.10.1
module github.com/linkedin/goavro
module github.com/linkedin/goavro/v2
The last few years I cannot help but feel they were very close to making 2 and 3 play nice together, but the idea ironically lost traction because of how much Python 3 adoption had accelerated.
If Go is successful for any significant period of time, that will change.
I think Python’s packaging story is a bummer in part because Python leans so hard on C which doesn’t have a standard build system or a sane approach to building or packaging.
Sure, and when it has been “pretty established” for a couple of decades, it’ll have a chance to have the community weight of important legacy projects that Python has.
First of all, it’s not much of a consolation to users that the packaging and performance are bad “because the language is old”, and secondly Python had already had half a dozen significant changes to its packaging format and ecosystem by the time it was Go’s age (distutils, cheeseshop/pypi, PEP241, setuptools, eggs, easy_install, etc).
Note that by this time, Python’s package management was far more complex than Go’s and it was also far more painful (and indeed, still is far more painful). Note that Go deprecated GOPATH when the language was already 9 years old, at a point when it was quite a lot older and more widely used than Python’s myriad package formats which are still supported today.
We can say “No fair! Go has the benefit of hindsight!” and true enough, but again as a user, I don’t much care—I just want the tool that’s going to solve my problem with the least headache.
And this isn’t even touching on the Python 2-3 saga, which began when Python 2 was merely 8 years old and lasted for more than a decade. If you want to argue that we should use the Python 1.0 release date for our comparison, then fine—call me in ~4 years if the Go ecosystem is on the precipice of a suite of breaking changes which constitute an existential crisis. My money says that wonky happen.
No, its a an argument that applies to the ease of making disruptive changes to languages with less legacy in the ecosystem (age is a factor, but not the only one; its also a reason why Ruby, which was a similar age with the disruptive 1.8 to 1.9 transition had an easier time than Python did with 2 -> 3).
It doesn't apply to all criticism, or even to “older languages” generally (at least not equally, though survivorship bias means it is likely at least somewhat applicable to older languages that it is interesting to discuss in the first place.)
Another detail: since your import path change also affects internal imports between packages within your module, you also need to fixup a bunch of .go files in your repo (worst case all of them).
I still think it's not a big deal (it's all pretty straightforward non-magic). Just a small nitpick that it's not just one go.mod change.
What? From the post:
> The recommended strategy is to develop v2+ modules in a directory named after the major version suffix.
> …
> We recommend that module authors follow this strategy as long as they have users developing in GOPATH mode.
Although with a reservation, they clearly do recommend it.
It's documentation written when GOPATH was still a widely used for development.
I think nowadays it's less of a concern to have a module first code base with GOPATH unsupported. It's nicer to use a V2 branch. Or delegate V1 to a V1 branch and maintain V2 in master.