> On Jun 4, 2020, at 7:29 PM, Nick Rosbrook <rosbro...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> The simplest short-term way to fix this would be to remove the `go fmt` call >> from `gengotypes.py`. It’s actually relatively unusual for generated code >> to look pretty (or even be looked at). We could also consider adding in >> some “manual” formatting in gengotypes.py, like indentation, so that it >> doesn’t look too terrible. >> >> Nick, do you have time to work on a patch like that? > > Yes, I have time to work on a quick patch for this. I'll see what it > would take to add a bit of basic manual formatting, but of course the > original purpose of using gofmt was to avoid re-creating formatting > logic. I'll likely just remove the call to go fmt. > > Out of curiosity, would it be totally out of the question to require > having gofmt installed (not for 4.14, but in the future)? I ask because > I haven't seen it discussed one way or the other.
I think I’d like to try to avoid it, unless / until we have a “core component” written in golang. For one, if we added it as a core dependency, we’d need to be backwards compatible to the oldest version of golang of distros on which we want to build; that would include Debian oldstable, Ubuntu LTS, probably CentOS 7 at least, possibly CentOS 6, and so on. If any of those didn’t have golang available, then we’d basically have to decide between dropping support for those distros, and making golang optional. I don’t at the moment have a good feel for what other people in the community feel about this, but generally speaking being fanatically backwards compatible is an investment in the long-term ecosystem; keeping Xen *as a whole* building on older distros is an example of that. (FWIW I don’t think we have an official rubric, but my starting point is that we should try to build on all still-supported major distros; that would include CentOS 6 until Q4 of 2020, if my quick Google search is correct.) One advantage of making golang optional is that we don’t have to be quite so backwards compatible — up until we declare the feature “fully supported”, we can move the minimum required version forward at will if we want to rely on new features. -George
