That's great to quickly show someone a program, but not so great if they try it a few weeks later and get a non-stable version of your program, otherwise that definitely won't be it, they'll have to spend some time figuring out what went wrong.

If Go adds some method to specify a tagged version that could be pretty nice though.

I hope it goes without saying that there's no way this kind of hack (neat as it is) is a substitute for a proper package management system like npm (which is a very good package manager).

This is a nifty feature and npm can do something very similar:

    npm install git://github.com/substack/node-optimist.git

How's that any faster than

  npm install express

Not only do npm handle versioning for you, you also don't have to remember the host or username. Obviously Go is a younger community, and could make a package manager some day, but I'm puzzled by how you're comparing this positively with npm.

It is faster because you don't have to install npm, the case I was explaining involves someone with no developing skills.

And I'm not saying this feature of Go is better than npm, I also use npm and I like it very much. What I like is the fact that Go comes already with this feature and I don't need anything extra.

I believe that npm is now included as part of all node distributions.

Oh I get it, you're talking about from a package developer's standpoint. Not having to register your package with a central directory does save a bit of time for you I guess.

But when installing packages, I have to say, npm is fantastic.

You don't have to do this with npm either. You can provide a URL to a tarball or a git repository and npm will install from there.

And npm ships with node, so this is no different.

Furthermore npm can install git URLs directly too, including tags and branches if you need a particular one. Just specify the url as the "version" in your dependencies section of package.json. Totally trivial.