Continuation of gox project
ruflin opened this issue · comments
The gox project is of great use for us and I would love to see this project further developed with support for additional platforms which were added to Golang. There haven't been much changes in the last year but based on the forks and open PR's there seems to be interest from the community. Looking at the forks of the projects (https://github.com/mitchellh/gox/network) a few forks have integrated open PR's for their own needs I assume.
Instead of having the changes in different places I would love to see this project moving forward in one place. My preferred option would be in this repository here or a "blessed" fork form @mitchellh . @mitchellh could you share your thoughts on the future of this project? Thanks a lot for all the work you put into this so far.
Mentioning @mattfarina @dave-tucker @roscopecoltran @Alexhaber here as I see you guys forked and changed the project very recently and curious to here your thoughts.
@ruflin I forked gox so I could add support for building packer on some other architectures (mainly s390x and ppc64le). Support in packer upstream would require my changes to be merged here + a PR to packer to enable them. I'm willing to make that contribution... but the fact that there are already many open PR's here that effectively make the same change has put me off.
My £0.02 is that if this is to be used in active upstream projects like packer then it should be maintained and if not, it should be replaced.
(NOTE: This comment is not intended to be inflammatory 🔥) Other than my need for packer on weird architectures I don't use gox. I'm quite happy with make and adjusting the GOOS and GOARCH myself. This isn't for everyone though, so if people are using it and are happy with it, then that's cool 😎
Hey folks, having been using a fork of gox myself for some time Mitchell gave me write access here. In the next few weeks I'll be going through everything and seeing what I can do to get this going again.
@mattfarina That is great news. Anything we can help here?
@dave-tucker In our case for beats (https://github.com/elastic/beats) we only use gox without packer and are pretty happy. We could do the same with some shell scripts probably but we would just reinvent what gox does.
@ruflin One of the first things I'd like is to get the tests passing again and to get Travis CI and AppVeyor setup. Then I'll be a little more confident in what's merged going forward.
@mattfarina I wonder if we should start with a very quick fix for the tests as I did here: https://github.com/mitchellh/gox/compare/master...ruflin:quick-test-fix?expand=1 This brings the test back to green (for go1.9.2) and it allows us to do follow up PR's adding all the definitions for the golang versions matching the platforms instead of doing it all at once.
In general I wonder how far back older Golang versions should be supported.
@mattfarina Yep, great stuff. Just left a minor comment.
@mattfarina From my perspective we can close this issue as I'm seeing the project is moving forward again which is awesome. Thanks for taking this up.