Question regarding "go get" compatibility

[doraskayo]

The README says that "Packages that use husk will never be go get-able." This seems to create a very complicated, multi-staged and network-dependent build procedure.

Can you elaborate on the technical reason why husk itself and packages that use it cannot be go get-able?

[fasterthanlime]

Well, Go packages can't have preinstall or postinstall scripts. They can't download prebuilt binaries, they can barely compile C code, but not other languages.

So there's simply some steps needed to compile husk that go get doesn't support.

In practice, that's not a big problem for us - the prebuilt binaries are actually downloaded while doing "npm install", so in development, everything just works. And on CI we use nodejs scripts to drive the build process anyway. You can look at how both of these are done by looking at the itch-setup repository.

husk is not meant to be used outside of internal itch.io projects, so I don't expect other folks to have problems either.

I don't plan on maintaining husk forever - it's a temporary measure until I manage to get rid of my Go code completely.

So, feel free to take inspiration from this approach, but if you decide to go a similar route, expect to maintain it yourself!

Hope that helps.