cmd/godoc: confused by symlinks in GOROOT: godoc: corpus fstree is nil

[benbarbour]

Please answer these questions before submitting your issue. Thanks!

1. What version of Go are you using (go version)?
   go version go1.6 linux/amd64
2. What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)?
   GOARCH="amd64"
   GOBIN=""
   GOEXE=""
   GOHOSTARCH="amd64"
   GOHOSTOS="linux"
   GOOS="linux"
   GOPATH="/home/me/Code/go"
   GORACE=""
   GOROOT="/usr/lib/go"
   GOTOOLDIR="/usr/lib/go/pkg/tool/linux_amd64"
   GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT="1"
   CC="gcc"
   GOGCCFLAGS="-fPIC -m64 -pthread -fmessage-length=0"
   CXX="g++"
   CGO_ENABLED="1"
3. What did you do?
   go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc
sudo -E go install golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc
godoc -http=":8080"
4. What did you expect to see?
   godoc running on the command line, listening to HTTP requests
5. What did you see instead?
   "2016/03/31 11:15:45 godoc: corpus fstree is nil", followed by program exit with status code -1
6. Other notes
   • It was working when I was running go 1.5, I added the ubuntu-lxc/lxd-stable ppa and upgraded to go 1.6.
   • I tried running go get with --update, and then tried removing all references I could find to godoc and the installing again using the commands from question # 3.
   • which godoc gives "/usr/lib/go/bin/godoc"
   • godoc net/http prints the documentation on the command line, as expected.

[mwhudson]

Unfortunately godoc gets confused by the symlinks in $GOROOT. The debian packaging of godoc carries a patch that hacks around this, I guess some kind of better solution would be, well, better.

[benbarbour]

Hmmm... in the meantime, could you point me to the patch and/or package with the fix? Might help other people searching for this bug too.

[benbarbour]

Here's a partially functioning workaround for anyone who cares.

If I run godoc -http=":8080 -goroot /usr/share/go (where /usr/share/go is the path that some of the symlinks in GOROOT point to) the server starts. It can't find the "Documents" page so I can't view "Effective Go" and friends locally, but at least I can navigate around package docs, including my own packages.

[tomdee]

I got this working by removing the docs symlink and taking a copy of the docs source..

in /usr/lib/go-1.6

sudo mv doc doc.old
sudo cp -ra ../../share/doc/golang-1.6-doc/html doc

[gopherbot]

CL https://golang.org/cl/45096 mentions this issue.

[bradfitz]

Repro instructions:

$ mkdir $HOME/gorootsym_under
$ cd $HOME/gorootsym_under
$ ln -s $GOROOT/bin
$ ln -s $GOROOT/src
$ ln -s $GOROOT/pkg
$ ls -l $HOME/gorootsym_under/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 bradfitz bradfitz 21 Jul 14 19:06 bin -> /home/bradfitz/go/bin
lrwxrwxrwx 1 bradfitz bradfitz 21 Jul 14 19:06 pkg -> /home/bradfitz/go/pkg
lrwxrwxrwx 1 bradfitz bradfitz 21 Jul 14 19:06 src -> /home/bradfitz/go/src

$ GOROOT=$HOME/gorootsym_under GOPATH= godoc -http=:6060 -v
2017/07/14 19:06:44 godoc: corpus fstree is nil