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Comment by est | Hacker News Reader

I always have this question:

Since a large project like Golang has so many auto-build tools and test OSes, how hard is it to provide a binary download for e.g. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS? You know, not tarballs, but actual static binaries as deb packages installable via apt-get.

Good examples:

http://wiki.nginx.org/Install

https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.6/installation/...

I root for open source movement, but to install something on a popular arch/OS by compiling from source everytime is just meaningless power consumption and adding CO2 emissions.

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golang.org offers two types of downloads for Linux: a source tarball and a pre-compiled tarball. If you download the pre-compiled tarball, you just have to extract it somewhere and set some environment variables (all explained in detail on golang.org).

If you really want to install Go via your package manager, you can install the golang package from the Ubuntu repositories. However, this package is naturally on an outdated version of Go. Also worth mentioning is godeb[1] which can generate and install a .deb of any version of Go for you.

[1]: http://blog.labix.org/2013/06/15/in-flight-deb-packages-of-g...

> extract it somewhere and set some environment variables

That's exactly the problems package would solve, well, plus easy update capabilities.

To install simply download the tarball, extract it to /usr/local/ and add /usr/local/go/bin to your $PATH. If you want to install it to a different location (I like to keep it in my home directory), you just to set $GOROOT to that path and set your $PATH accordingly. To update, just remove the old go dir and extract the new tarball in the same place. I'm ok with it.

Simply is never that simply. There is always something that happen to suck in IT. You think you have done everything right and sometime, you just made a little misinterpretation that screw everything and you can lose a lot of time figuring out what.

That being said, I had no problem installing go on my ubuntu, despite the fact that I consider that the installation process sucks.

$ wget https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.4.2.linux-amd64.ta...

$ tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.4.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz

$ echo "PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin" >> /etc/profile

That's it, it is that simple. All you have to do now is set your $GOPATH, and you would need to do that even if you had installed Go through a package.

> If you really want to install Go via your package manager,

Don't most people want to install X via their package manager?

> However, this package is naturally on an outdated version of Go

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not here - why would a package such as this be outdated?

The Ubuntu 14.04 package ships Go1.2

http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/devel/golang-go

>I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not here - why would a package such as this be outdated?

Because of the way software is packaged in most Linux distributions. The upstream version is frozen in that particular release.

One would hope that being six to ten months behind the development branch wouldn't make very much difference. If it does, I'd argue Go isn't mature enough for general use yet.

It's not behind the development branch, it's behind the stable branch. The stable branch is called stable for a reason, because it's stable. You can still use the older versions and they're not bad, but the newer versions have brought improvements, and I see no reason why Ubuntu shouldn't package new stable versions when the Go team is committed to stability.

The Go project makes stable releases every 6 months. They are extensively tested and fully compatible with all previous major releases. But we do introduce new tools, libraries, and minor language features. Developers almost always want to be using the latest stable release of Go. (There's seldom a reason not to.)

Golang could host a PPA.

If you don't have experience with packaging, https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm is probably your best bet. And it is super easy to use.

Try this https://github.com/geosoft1/tools (related blog post: http://www.webupd8.org/2014/09/easily-install-latest-golang-...)

You can download and install the binaries on Ubuntu: http://pokstad.com/2015/02/03/installing-go-binaries-on-ubun...

For debian-esque, I use https://github.com/niemeyer/godeb .

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