Go 1.3 is unmaintained/unsupported upstream

[Scott Kitterman]

On Saturday, February 14, 2015 05:00:29 PM Martin Pitt wrote:
> Robie Basak [2015-02-13 17:39 +0000]:
> > But this is the way the world is going, and something I think Ubuntu
> > needs to adapt to.
> 
> I heavily disagree for something as fundamental as a
> toolchain/compiler, but we've had this conversation a lot of times
> already :)
> 
> > I'm not sure how, though. In theory, if their quality is good, could
> > we SRU and rely on their backward compatibility guarantee?
> 
> It's great to hear that there now is some effort to maintain backwards
> compatibility. When we started to adopt Go, there wasn't even that,
> but it was still in the early stage of "anything goes". If there is
> some enforced backwards compatibility now, it does sound prudent to
> re-discuss the maintenance/upgrades indeed.
> 
> > Would we really need to rebuild all reverse dependencies?
> 
> If we'd update Go in a stable release, then we must make sure that all
> reverse dependencies are still *buildable* and still work without a
> regression. IMHO they don't actually need to be rebuilt as SRUs too in
> the sense of doing 70 no-change uploads. We'd only need to upload
> those reverse deps which need sourceful changes to build and/or work
> with a new Go compiler (and then need to have an SRU exception for
> this).

Before libclamav stabilized, we had to do things similar to this.  We not only 
rebuilt them, but also tested they still worked (at least lightly).  That was 
part of the TB approved conditions for the SRU exception.  It takes a lot of 
work, but we have established for a somewhat similar situation it can be done 
and successfully mitigate SRU regression risks.

Scott K