At the very least they could have continued their hard core hands off approach of allowing the community to solve it. But instead they half-assed it and started capriciously anointing chosen solutions and honestly we're probably in a worse spot than we were before dep came along.

Plus, lets be honest here, there's no excuse for constantly changing APIs and binaries. If this was truly about getting the best ideas and lessons learned we'd just see refactors of existing tools with slow migrations to new concepts, but instead we've seen multiple complete rewrites, despite multiple efforts to build common libraries that should prevent such events!

Huh? Of those three, I would only consider Java "solved", and both Maven & Ant are far from the panacea of package management.

virtualenv is a community project (much like dep), is pretty new in the grand scheme of things, and isn't completely standardized (some projects use tox, some list out requirements.txt (rarely version pinned), and others vendor.

As for C++, almost everyone does something a bit different so I don't see how that is at all relatable.

virtualenv was a community project but based on that venv was created and has been part of the official Python distribution since Python 3.3, released in 2012.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html

It doesn't stop there either I've seen python projects using nothing, virtualenv, venv, pip-tools, and pipenv.

I finally feel like pipenv is the true solution and it seems very new. All that said and Python is quite old relative to Go.

* a central package registry

* a file to describe dependencies

* a command line tool to install, build and publish packages

In Python things are more fragmented. You have:

* a central package registry

* a file to store some of your dependencies (Pipfile)

* a command line tool to install packages (Pipenv)

* a file called setup.py in which you need to specify your dependencies again (in another format). You can execute this file to build/publish packages.

It think it would allow for a much nicer user experience if pipenv/pipfile would handle packaging/building/publishing as well..

Of course, gradle hooks into the whole maven ecosystem but that is one of its advantages. Everybody in Java land understands Maven packages but how you generate doesn't matter.

If it wasn't for Android, I wouldn't bother 1 second to learn Gradle.

But I guess Groovy needs some project to keep it alive, now that no one remebers the days JSF beans would be written in Groovy or JUGs were holding Grails talks month after month.

C++ has no widely-used dependency management systems.

Both languages are doing fine.

On Windows, Microsoft is investing on vcpkg as package manager.

https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg

Regardless of your setup at the end of the day you're using pip to solve your dependency graph, and have been for over a decade.

Except where have they done that? They've had 40 years and their solution to the C binary function error code return problem was... to add a special way to return an error code. There have been superior solutions to this for 20 years at least.

How long have we known about the value of generics?

To me, the fact that they can't figure out how to solve this isn't remotely suprising.

Most of Go's features are those that proved their value over 40 years. There are no dependency management schemes that have that kind of reputation. Good ideas take time and misfeatures are expensive.

If they are willing to throw out that requirement for something as fundamental why should dependency management be held to so high a standard.

Combine those 2 facts & I think it’s fair to say golang is willing to base things (central ones even) on untried ideas, which directly contradicts your stated position which was precisely that no dependency management scheme lives up to the precedent of the other accepted features of the language.

This is trivially proven incorrect via looking at other language dependency management schemes that have much more broadly proven their worth.

The Go designers used CSP over the course of many decades via Newsqueak, Alef, Limbo and Plan 9 C's libthread.

Did the principles enjoy a feature while using it on Plan 9? Likely to be included. A feature having broad industry or academic backing, or a long history? Immaterial.

In fact, as nice as Go might be, if it had the AT&T Research Labs stamp instead of Google's, it would been just as successful.

Heaven-forbid you want to upgrade a package that exists in all 130 projects in the solution (not my call to have that many projects) - you may as well take a long lunch. I will try to make that the last task of the day so I can let it run for as long as it needs to.

The VS UI for NuGet is terribly buggy.

Try to build a C++ or Android project and then go for lunch instead.

NuGET is great.

Most likely someone modified the packages for an individual project and not the solution as a whole. Always manage packages at the solution level and your much less likely to have these issues, unless you have multiple solutions...

Basically, it 'just works' for simple senarios, its just not very good for anything else.

If you want a comprehensive guide to why its not awesome look at the 'packet' website, they cover the issues quite clearly.

^ you can actually use local dependencies, but its irritating and poorly supported (still uses the global system cache, forcing a cache flush to update).