Packaging is both the best and worst of Go. I love the decentralisation, so there's no central directory of Go code. We don't have pypi, we don't have rubygems or npm, we have Github.
As others have pointed out, you can use directories as namespaces, which works nicely. But I've found, personally, that splitting my projects into separate repos for each namespace is actually beneficial. Helps keep my code clean and separated.
That being said, versioning is a real pain right now. The best thing I've found is to fork a repo when I decide to use it, then pull in updates as I adjust my code to work with them. Definitely not ideal, and if you have a lot of projects using the same dependency, it becomes a major headache.
There are some workarounds, and we've discussed the topic at great length on the mailing list. I think it's something we'll see a solution to in the next few years. But one of the things about Go that I really enjoy is that the core team is hesitant to push half-baked ideas onto the community. When we see a solution, it tends to be an elegant, clean solution that fits perfectly into the problem it solves.
In other words: yes, there are some problems. Yes, I do think they'll go away. Yes, I do think we'll need to be patient. Yes, I do think it will be worth it.
As others have pointed out, you can use directories as namespaces, which works nicely. But I've found, personally, that splitting my projects into separate repos for each namespace is actually beneficial. Helps keep my code clean and separated.
That being said, versioning is a real pain right now. The best thing I've found is to fork a repo when I decide to use it, then pull in updates as I adjust my code to work with them. Definitely not ideal, and if you have a lot of projects using the same dependency, it becomes a major headache.
There are some workarounds, and we've discussed the topic at great length on the mailing list. I think it's something we'll see a solution to in the next few years. But one of the things about Go that I really enjoy is that the core team is hesitant to push half-baked ideas onto the community. When we see a solution, it tends to be an elegant, clean solution that fits perfectly into the problem it solves.
In other words: yes, there are some problems. Yes, I do think they'll go away. Yes, I do think we'll need to be patient. Yes, I do think it will be worth it.