Some concerns on the current situation on Go packaging

[Gabriel Arazas]

Hello! I'm a bit concerned about the current situation of packaging of 
Go applications in Guix.

Go modules also use semantic versioning [1] similarly to Rust packages. 
In Guix, some of the Rust packages are packaged with different versions 
[2]. This is nice (and tedious) as applications are more likely to work 
as intended.

However, there doesn't seem to be documented practice of packaging 
different versions for Go applications. The lack of such section from 
the manual also gives an additional impression unlike Rust packaging 
[2]. I don't know much examples that can be found committed in Guix repo 
but this makes adding Go applications to be more of a pain. I mean 
packaging Rust apps is also a pain as much as packaging Go apps (at 
least in my experience) but at least there are some explicit guidelines 
you can follow which is also present when exploring the code.

For example, I'm about to package gum [3] and it needs a different 
version of termenv (some commit after 0.11.0) compared to the packaged 
version in Guix (0.8.1). I'm very tempted to add a different package for 
it with a different version (which is thankfully easy to add).

In the long term, I'm more concerned about adding and maintaining of 
these applications. I thought I should point them out and hopefully get 
the community to reach to a consensus for Go packaging. Or is there 
already some initiatives (or a consensus or even some discussions) that 
I missed?

[1]: https://go.dev/doc/modules/version-numbers
[2]: 
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Rust-Crates.html#Rust-Crates
[3]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum