gomodifytags VS versioninfo

gomodifytags

https://github.com/fatih/gomodifytags - generate or modify struct tags

I suspect it's because Go's general philosophy is that it's better to be verbose and explicit (than terse and magical). Probably falls under "clear is better than clever" from Rob Pike's Go Proverbs: http://go-proverbs.github.io/

I think if this feature was added, it would not be with struct tags, but with an Encoder.SetFieldTransform(json.SnakeCase) or similar setting.

That might be quite a nice feature, actually. You could provide your own function to transform names when marshaling, and for unmarshaling it would strip punctuation and match case insensitively (because it's hard to do the reverse transform, for example should user_id go to UserId or UserID, and if the latter, how does the transform know?).

In any case, it seems like an issue was opened proposing something like that a couple of years ago (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/23027), and Russ Cox responded that the JSON package is basically done, but you could either fork it and add the feature, or use a tool that modifies struct tags like https://github.com/fatih/gomodifytags

Oh, also https://github.com/carlmjohnson/versioninfo . Always need that.

Don’t. It’s obsolete. Just use debug.ReadBuildInfo()

That’s obsolete. See https://github.com/carlmjohnson/versioninfo. Even if it weren’t, Make is an inappropriate tool. Because it is based on file modtimes, it can’t react to git hash changes. You just have rerun the steps every time, at which point Bash is a less awful language.

Go 1.18 updates the debug info to also include the git status of the build. See https://github.com/carlmjohnson/versioninfo

I use this trick in my versioninfo package. Obviously, it can't give you other tags, but most of the time the tag you want to know about is v1.2.3 anyway, and since tags are mutable but the Go sum DB is immutable, this is safer than just saying what tag was on disk at build time.

I subscribed to GH activity for the correspondence friendliness-enhancing library by the author:

https://github.com/carlmjohnson/versioninfo/

The primary motivation curiousity to learn if this becomes "the [best/default] way" folks reach for when leveraging BuildInfo to deliver explicit binary versioning.