x/website: revise download page (system requirements for stable/archived versions)

[nathany]

"the official 1.4 download doesn't work on Macs. You need to use the special 1.4 download link on the build-from-source page. It would be nice if either the official 1.4 download were updated, or if another one were added with an annotation on the downloads page." - @robpike #18545 (comment)

related issue: #16352

[nathany]

Should Go 1.4-bootstrap be added under "Stable versions" so it is visible without scanning through the archived versions?

Perhaps the download page should also say something about macOS Sierra requiring Go 1.7 or better or Go 1.4-bootstrap?

[ALTree]

I don't think a prominent link to go1.4-bootstrap and/or notes about Sierra-bootstrapping requiring a specific version are things that belong in our main download page.

The only reason you might want to download go1.4 is for bootstrapping on a system for which we don't distribute binaries; and for this reason links to go1.4-bootstrap should stay in the 'compiling-from-source' doc page, and only there.

[nathany]

The only reason you might want to download go1.4 is for bootstrapping on a system for which we don't distribute binaries; and for this reason links to go1.4-bootstrap should stay in the 'compiling-from-source' doc page, and only there.

Makes sense to me.

Currently the featured downloads indicate system requirements, such as "OS X 10.8 or later".

Perhaps the tables below for stable and archived version should also include system requirements, including an upper bound if applicable.

e.g. go1.7.6.darwin-amd64.pkg could say macOS 10.8 to 10.11 -- to address the issue that it won't work on newer versions of macOS

Also, some older versions of Go may work on older operating systems -- which may be useful information for some people.

[nathany]

A few other minor revisions to the download page:

• "Apple macOS" instead of OS X, as it was renamed. I've heard this even applies to past versions, though I haven't been able to verify that.
• "Intel/AMD" or "x86" 64-bit processor instead of only Intel

[ALTree]

This two

• OS X -> macOS (the official name was changed)
• reword "Intel 64-bit" since it looks like we want an Intel processor (but we just want x86)

seems reasonable. You'll still need @broady approval, I think.

[ALTree]

Perhaps the tables below for stable and archived version should also include system requirements, including an upper bound if applicable

I don't see how we could add this information to that table without cluttering it, though. It's already quite packed and some of the requirements are much more wordy to write down that the OSX ones.

[bradfitz]

@broady, feel free to move this to Unreleased or Go 1.10 as you'd like.

[nathany]

Sorry for not contributing these minor changes yet.

Are they tied to the release cycle?

[bradfitz]

@nathany, currently. There's a long-running desire to decouple Go release branches from the website (the website runs off the release's godoc binary), but that hasn't happened.

So this is probably out of scope for Go 1.9 at this point.