Gateway API go.mod should not have dependencies caused by conformance tests

[rikatz]

What: Split the dependencies of Gateway API code (the API itself) from the needs of Conformance tests
Why: APIs should not depend on code other than the strictly necessary to be consumed by other projects.

How:

Needs to be investigated. The simpler approach would be to split the go.mod of the root directory from conformance, making conformance be "its own go project".

We need to investigate how painful it will be, the amount of effort to change pipelines, problems that may be faced by consumers after this change

[aojea]

I've seen two options to solve this in my experience

• new and modern approach using go workspaces
• legacy way of having two modules in the same repo

My experience with:

• k/k uses workspaces
• k/cloud-provider-gcp uses multiple modules in the same repo

invest in workspaces, has a learning curve but it is more sustainable in the long term

[rikatz]

yeah, idea is to invest in workspaces or at least analyze it and check the effort. This will also need some refactor on conformance and utils to not cause any cycle dependency

[rikatz]

/assign