proposal: cmd/dist: cli based upgrades

[matthewhartstonge]

A number of the programming languages I use support upgrade paths built into their tooling which has made keeping up to date extremely easy. This is definitely more of a ✨nice to have✨ for developer experience.

Benefits

• Could make upgrades easier for newcomers.
• Could make it easier for developers to stay up to date.
• Could make polyglot device management easier for teams by the CLI being able to run the upgrade.
• Could help stop human polling of go.dev, twitter or rss release feeds to know when a new version is out.

Prior Art

• flutter upgrade
• rustup upgrade
• Most JavaScript frameworks provide some form of the above, i.e. ember update but this is little different as these are libraries/frameworks than a language.

Example

The following example pinched from the Flutter upgrade flow:

$ go upgrade
upgrading from go1.18.2 to go1.18.3...

Downloading Go SDK...
Expanding downloaded archive...

Upgrading Go...
Go 1.18.3 • channel stable • https://github.com/golang/go.git
revision 4068be5 (28 days ago) • 2022-06-02 04:38:00 +1200

$ go upgrade
go is already up to date on channel stable
go version go1.18.3 windows/amd64

[jacobishao]

how often do you update go sdk? I rarely do it. maybe one year, I guess.

[ericlagergren]

There is already go install golang.org/dl/go1.2.3@latest.

[mvdan]

You could certainly build this on top of https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/dl, like @ericlagergren says. Note that there is also https://go.dev/dl/?mode=json to quickly get the information on what the latest stable version is.

I agree that a nice UX would be useful to some people, but I'm not convinced that this needs to be part of Go itself - go install golang.org/dl/go1.18.3@latest && go1.18.3 download && go1.18.3 version works without needing any special support in the Go toolchain, for example.

[earthboundkid]

I worry that this would integrate poorly with package managers like Homebrew, apt, etc.

[Zerotask]

I really like the idea of having a simple upgrade command. Go stands for simplicity but there is no simple option to upgrade itself.

What is the reason against a go upgrade?

[seankhliao]

Duplicate of #27700

[matthewhartstonge]

Cheers @seankhliao - tried a number of keywords but couldn't find an existing issue.

[rsc]

This proposal has been added to the active column of the proposals project
and will now be reviewed at the weekly proposal review meetings.
— rsc for the proposal review group

[earthboundkid]

I think this issue should be taken off the proposals list and #27700 added in its place.

[rsc]

This proposal is a duplicate of a previously discussed proposal, as noted above,
and there is no significant new information to justify reopening the discussion.
The issue has therefore been declined as a duplicate.
— rsc for the proposal review group