extender

Go toolchain subcommand extender.

See gomatic/extenders for a list of known extenders.

for critics

Here's a quick explanation for the shortsighted who just love to criticize before they take the two seconds needed to grasp the actual purpose of such a tool:

• This isn't about typing go vend instead of govend.
• This is about being able to replace or augment native go toolchain commands. e.g.
  • Do you have specific things you need as part of go build, e.g. adding common -X? Then just install the augmentations and you've changed the behavior of go build.
  • Don't like how go dep, go vet, go * works? Replace it with a different implementation.

It allows Go developers to continue using the standard toolchain and simple commands but gain different/customized functionality ... because, thankfully, we don't all like exactly the same things, so flexibility is useful.

If you're concerned about complexity and fragmentation ... then i'll challenge you to create a simple toolchain that does everything everyone needs in every situation. When someone has done that, I'll delete this repository.

introduction

extender provides a go executable to precede GOROOT/bin/go.

This allows you to extend the go toolchain or even replace Go's native subcommands.

⚠️ Do not use this unless you have a good understanding of the go environment and, more generally, configuring your shell's environment.

extender's go executable provides the ability to call subcommands through the go command. The subcommands are implemented as executables with a recognizable prefix (default is go- and go) instead of natively by GOROOT/bin/go (and the GOTOOLDIR tools). If such an executable doesn't exist, it falls back to GOROOT/bin/go.

For example,

go ex

will (by default) execute

go-ex

or, if that doesn't exist, it tries

goex

A consequence: allows pointing the go command to separate versions of go.

GOROOT=/go1.8.1 go build
GOROOT=/go1.7.5 go build

Installation

⚠️ Installing this adds a go executable to your GOBIN or GOPATH[0]/bin and overrides GOROOT/bin in the PATH

go get github.com/gomatic/extender/...
eval $(extender)

Additional, you can specify the prefixes that'll be considered extensions (the default is go- go):

eval $(extender go go-)

will first look for, e.g., goex and if not found, go-ex, then try GOROOT/bin/go ex.

Writing extensions

See examples in gomatic/go-vbuild.