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**Jon Calhoun:** One of the questions that I've seen people ask a lot, either on Twitter, or even on our GoTimeFM Slack - this is sort of intended to eventually be a resource for the community, so they're all asking "Are there plans to make it open source, or to give the community a bigger role in the project?" I get e... |
**Steve Francia:** It's something we're looking into. We definitely wanna make sure that whatever we do, it's the best thing for the community and our users, and serves their needs the best way. We're trying to make sure that we're doing that in the best way possible. So there's ongoing discussion; it's actually part o... |
**Julie Qiu:** Yeah, and something that we also are planning on doing pretty soon is opening up the Go issue tracker to accepting feedback. We already described that we have two different channels to get feedback - the email, and also sharing feedback in the footer, but obviously, these are all private topics, and we'v... |
**Mat Ryer:** That's great. In your pkg.go.dev, how do you decide what's a popular package, and how do you decide which packages you're gonna feature on there? |
**Steve Francia:** So you're saying on specifically that page... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yes. Because that's gonna be essentially -- I mean, packages listed there are gonna be the ones people are using probably, right? ...eventually, if not already. |
**Steve Francia:** We hope so. To some degree, they're already packages people are using quite often. That's why they're there. |
**Mat Ryer:** That's why they're called "Popular Packages", is it? |
**Steve Francia:** Yeah, that's how we got the name. That's how we came up with it. |
**Mat Ryer:** It makes sense. |
**Steve Francia:** Believe it or not, there were several meetings to -- no, I'm just kidding. We just did that. |
**Mat Ryer:** \[laughs\] |
**Steve Francia:** So Featured Packages is a little bit of a curated one. They're largely popular packages as well, but they're ones that we thought fit a niche, or address needs that people were looking for... And then Popular Packages is just the popular packages from the database, based on import count. |
**Jon Calhoun:** When you're looking at those curated lists, I know there's always these -- they're like Awesome Go, or Awesome... You'll see different lists like that on GitHub, that list a bunch of packages grouped by what they're for. Some will be graphical user interfaces, others will be like database packages... A... |
I guess one of the questions I'd ask is how do you guys draw that line between -- you know, you don't wanna reject people or be a gatekeeper, but at the same time you need to... Like, just having everything listed in one place isn't necessarily useful... You know, just listing every single package that can connect to a... |
**Steve Francia:** If we look back to the beginning of search engines, the early days of the internet, early '90s, mid-'90s, you might recall that Yahoo! was one of the leading at the time, and they did it by doing the website directory, that was human-curated. And it worked well for a time. In fact, the reason everyon... |
Then Altavista came out. And Altavista had accuracy and quality, and it was fast. Well, it was fast... It was fast until people started using it; there was a time when it was blazing fast, and everyone was excited... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, but Steve, all software is fast until people start using it. It's the people using it that ruins it. That's why we have to care about making things work... |
**Steve Francia:** Well, then Google came around and figured out how to solve that problem too, of making it fast, and quality, and accurate. But I think there's a lot to learn from that experience. |
Awesome Go was and is still a great resource, but at the beginning, when packages were smaller, and there was less of a list, I think it was easier to maintain it and to keep track of it. As that list grows, it's harder and harder for humans to keep on top of it. So what Julie talked about earlier was these signals, th... |
If you're searching for -- you know, sometimes you're searching for things that Awesome Go curated predefined categories, but sometimes you're searching for things that aren't in those predefined categories. And no matter what you're searching for, you really want to know quality... And I think it comes back to those i... |
**Mat Ryer:** I once wrote a blog post and made a little repo alongside it to show the code... And I made some changes to it at some point a couple years later, and I started getting people opening issues, saying "You broke our build." This was just a repo to show off some ideas, it wasn't ever meant to be imported by ... |
**Julie Qiu:** I think to indicate that something isn't working anymore, you can email us. We've gotten requests for people to take down their packages from pkg.go.dev. So that's something that we do support doing. |
I think in the future -- some things that we've been discussing are like, say when someone archives their repository, for example, or deletes their repository, even if we might have the code for that to provide some kind of flag, so that people know about it. |
We don't currently have anything right now on the side for authors to say "You should use this package instead." I think that that feature would require some sort of thought about what that user experience would actually look like, or if that's something that we even want people to be able to do... So those are kind of... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. I mean, I would imagine something like a .go.dev file in the repo root, or something, where it could potentially have some metadata in there where we could communicate that. There are a few examples of that working quite well, where the tooling can notice those things. It's probably just that - a fe... |
**Julie Qiu:** Yeah, I think we've also discussed very early on during the brainstorming phase about other types of metadata that would help with that problem, too. For example, keywords would be great. If you could tag this package as like "It's a logging package", and so maybe that's what your package is, and that wa... |
**Mat Ryer:** Cool. No, but it's exciting though. |
**Julie Qiu:** Yeah. There's a lot of cool places that we can go. |
**Jon Calhoun:** It sounds like the experience you've described, Mat -- it's one I'm familiar with too, where you're kind of doing educational material, and you want them to have something that compiles and runs, but at the same time by making it something that compiles and runs, it also means somebody can import it an... |
**Steve Francia:** For this specific one -- I think you bring up a good example of different needs that we might have, that expand beyond just the static metadata, of like readme and license files that we currently use. For this specific one, if you don't want someone to import it, change the license to something that ... |
**Mat Ryer:** But the tools won't guard against that, will they? ...assuming that everyone checks their license before they import a package... |
**Jon Calhoun:** The other issue I have with that is let's say I'm teaching somebody how to do something... A lot of the times I want them to have the freedom to take chunks of that code and use it. And if I say "This is some really restricted license", then all of a sudden they're like "Well, I can't use what I learne... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. On the other hand, Jon, you've just thought up an excellent scam. |
**Carmen Andoh:** Don't give ideas. |
**Mat Ryer:** \[laughs\] |
**Steve Francia:** So the license question - I give that answer mostly tongue-in-cheek, because I think everything you said, Jon, is right. But we've heard from a lot of -- while maybe not every individual is doing this, companies are very concerned with this. License compliance is a huge deal, because it can really ge... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, it reports the licensing on all the packages, doesn't it? And does it exclude things where you don't recognize the license? |
**Julie Qiu:** Yeah, so it excludes certain content, but not exactly the repository itself. So the way that we make that distinction is based off of whether or not it's factual information about this repository, as opposed to content that we are taking and editing in some way. For example, what that package imports is ... |
If you look on pkg.go.dev and you're thinking about whether or not you should use a package, and you go to the documentation page and we don't think that its license is something that is redistributable, it will become really obvious really quickly. |
**Mat Ryer:** So therefore on the other hand if you do want things including, then pick a license that is gonna allow this. |
**Julie Qiu:** Yeah. That's something that we had gotten a lot of feedback about right after launch, because our license policy had been a bit strict... And also, I think we haven't provided a lot of information about exactly what information you need for your license... But we actually updated our license policy very ... |
**Mat Ryer:** Great, yeah. There is actually a Go tool - because I've used it - which will check the licenses of all your repos as well. So I'll dig that out and put it in the show notes too, because that can be quite useful. And it's actually worth bearing in mind from the beginning, because it's all very well -- usua... |
**Jon Calhoun:** I'm surprised somebody hasn't come up with something like goreturns, that you can customize for each company, that basically just does that when you're saving... Because every company has a different set of policies around what they'll allow, and it would be kind of nice to just have your code flag it ... |
**Mat Ryer:** Like a compiler-time error. |
**Jon Calhoun:** Yeah. Because if you just had something, it would just build it into that; it'd be kind of nice to have. |
**Mat Ryer:** Hm. Nice idea. |
**Carmen Andoh:** That sounds like a slick idea, for sure... Especially now, with software engineering in this day and age, and all this reuse, and the risks that carry with that. |
**Jon Calhoun:** Generally, I think people look on GitHub and they think "Oh, it's open source", but that doesn't necessarily -- people don't always put licenses there, and something being open source doesn't necessarily mean you can use it for what you wanna use it, especially if it's commercial. |
**Carmen Andoh:** Right. And the average software developer is not a lawyer... So they're just pulling it in, saying "Hey, let's see if it works." Yeah... \[laughs\] |
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