Do you really need latest Go for lazygit?

[dejlek]

Every now and then someone makes a PR that forces latest version of Go even though it is not really strictly necessary to build lazygit. This in turn makes very hard to build packages for "older" versions of popular distributions.

My COPR provides packages for Amazon Linux 2023, Fedora 42 and 43, EPEL 10, CentOS 10, RedHat 10, and few others, but I can't reliably build 0.56.0 on anything other than Fedora 43 and RawHide because only they have golang package v1.25.

Fedora 42 lazygit was downloaded 8k times ( https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/dejan/lazygit/ ), and now those people who use Fedora 42 (me included, i did not move to Fedora 43 yet), will not have lazygit 0.56.0 because of this! I could provide golang 1.25 myself, but I am not going to do that as that is not the way things are supposed to be...

This is what I am going to do - build lazygit 0.56.0 for only Fedora 43 and RawHide. People who want up-to-date lazygit on older versions of these distributions will simply not have it without manual building, which is pity because not everybody wants to manually build these packages.

Finally, why do we need golang 1.25? I could build it with 1.24 without any problems (all i had to do was remove the ignore line from go.mod)

This is not a rant, just something for you, lazygit core devs, to think about. I will simply build lazygit packages for those versions of distros that I can build for, and move on, but it would be just two of them, instead of 10+...

[stefanhaller]

We did discuss this, and yes, I was against bumping the requirement unnecessarily. I kind of got overruled here, but I didn't resist very much either to be fair.

However, I don't really get what the problem is. Go has learned (I think in 1.22 or something) to download newer toolchains on demand; doesn't that work on Fedora for some reason?

[dejlek]

Thanks for the reply, Stefan. I am not a Go developer, so naturally I know very little about the toolchain. I do use lazygit though. :) Anyway, I will try to modify the RPM SPEC file to not insist on particular golang version and instead upgrade toolchain to the latest on the build machine. Wish me luck. Will close the discussion as there is no reason to discuss this further.

[stefanhaller]

You might have to play with things like go env -w GOTOOLCHAIN=auto if it's not the default on your system. Let me know if I can help in any way (though I'm not really an expert in these things either).

[dejlek]

It is set to "local" by default on all Fedora-based distros, which is what I expect because it makes everything much more deterministic.

[stefanhaller]

Ah yes, but that's the problem then, as it inhibits the automatic download of the necessary toolchain.