A collection of Go style, code review and project management notes.
NOTE: this is still a very early work in progress.
Projects SHOULD use hellogopher to be both go get-able and buildable with make from anywhere on the filesystem.
Libraries MUST be go get-able.
Use gvt or glide. DO check into git the entire vendor/ folder for projects, DO NOT check in vendor/ for libraries (but you're free to check in vendor/manifest if you like).
See also the Vendoring section of the hellogopher README.
Run go vet as part of testing or building. All go vet errors MUST be considered as test/build failures and fixed, including false positives.
Hellogopher will run go vet as part of make test, and fail on errors.
The flags package lends itself to a lot of misuse of global state.
In a main package, flags SHOULD be defined and registered in the main() function. This enforces proper argument passing, which eventually improves testability and readability.
Libraries MUST NOT register flags in the global context or in the init() function. Since flags are registered in a global context, the user wouldn't be able to import two libraries that define a -n flag, which is surprising and uncontrollable. Also, a user should be able to import a library without exposing its flags at all.
Instead, libraries SHOULD expose a RegisterFlags(*flag.FlagSet) function that registers the flags on the passed FlagSet, or on the global one of fs is nil. The flag variables SHOULD be public, so that in case of a conflict (or at will) the user can register or set them differently.
package handbook
import "flag"
// Variables that the flags will populate if RegisterFlags is used.
var (
Kill *bool // violently enforce the handbook
)
func RegisterFlags(fs *flag.FlagSet) {
if fs == nil {
fs = flag.CommandLine
}
Kill = flag.Bool("kill", false, "violently enforce the handbook")
}package handbook
import "flag"
type Handbook struct {
// Fields that the flags will populate if RegisterFlags is used.
Kill bool // violently enforce the handbook
// ...
}
func (h *Handbook) RegisterFlags(fs *flag.FlagSet) {
if fs == nil {
fs = flag.CommandLine
}
flag.BoolVar(&h.Kill, "kill", false, "violently enforce the handbook")
}