README.md

Depbleed

A Go linter that detects dependency-bleeding in Go packages.

Rationale

Go encourages a vendoring model for dependencies where projects have to copy - or fetch upon build - their dependencies and put them in a vendor folder. In Go, packages are uniquely named according to their relative path to the GOPATH. This causes situations where two libraries that use types from the same dependency but in different vendor folders have identical yet incompatible definitions for those types.

Consider the following layout in your library:

yourlib/
  vendor/
    lib-a/
      vendor/
        lib-foo/
          foo.go
    lib-b/
      vendor/
        lib-foo/
          foo.go

If foo.go contains a type Foo that both lib-a and lib-b expose, an instance of Foo from lib-a won't be usable as-is by lib-b. Go will complain that those are incompatible types (and rightly so).

While this may seem surprising, the real problem is not with Go's behavior but in the fact that both lib-a and lib-b bleed a type from their dependencies instead of providing an abstraction. Ideally, their dependencies should remain an implementation detail.

The only exception, of course, is for standard types and libraries, which are by definition the same for all libraries in your ecosystem.

Depbleed aims to detect dependency bleeding in your libraries, so that they don't cause the same problems for your users.

Check out the examples for real-cases of dependency bleeding.