alt Hacker NewsI'm confused by the article, and this comment, treating these URLs as difficult to replace.
Why can't you just search-and-replace? Presumably all of them refer to "GitHub.com" and not much else code will, so I'd think this was an exceptionally easy case.
Even easier for comments, since them being obsolete for a few hours during a migration doesn't exactly break anything.
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What about anyone else using your code? You can find and replace your own code, but do you have access to all of the code relying on your go library? Is it all yours? Customers? Other developers?
Even in the case where it’s an internal only Lu array, it can be complicated to refactor a library name.
Even easier than that, you can use the 'replace' statement in your go mod to change where the Go build system will try to pull the dependencies from; you can point to a folder on disk or to another forge, and if you want total control you can indirect everything to your own artifact cache via GOPROXY (which can be something as simple as a static folder of source code).
The "module name is network path" is a convenient convention but not at all some "limitation" of the tooling.
It's harder to replace in history.
I've gone through such a migration. Huge Go code base distributed across a lot of git repositories had to be moved to a different git host.
It was horrible. A team of people spent weeks. Different projects depended on different versions of the same internal libraries, we had to create a branch for each depended-on commit and make a version of that commit with the new URLs. The expressed goal was to end up with a system that's "exactly the same" as the old, just on a new host. Changing which version of libraries projects depends on would introduce unnecessary risk.
And the result is a code base where bisects are broken and where it's impossible to build an old version of any of the code without a ton of work.