Supported Go Versions

[paganotoni]

As we want to provide the best Developer experience possible with the Buffalo CLI and libraries we should focus on working on that experience instead of other maintenance tasks. At this moment we're maintaining multiple Go versions, which in some cases limits the APIs we can use for the tools.

There has been a not-so-public rule about supporting the last 2 versions of Go but in reality, we still run tests against 3 or 4 versions of Go. And some of our libraries are written with v1.13 API. As the Go team only actively supports two versions I think it would be good to embrace the same initiative and with that reduce the amount of work/considerations while working on Buffalo.

At this moment those 2 versions would be v1.17 and v1.18. This would mean that while Buffalo may still work with Go v1.16 we will not keep that version into consideration while developing (nor our test suites). Eventually, Buffalo will stop working with Go 1.16 due to APIs we use.

I envision we could make this evident by:

• Maintaining a supported-versions document (maybe on the .github repo)
• Having the CLI warn about the outdated version. p.e.
  [Warning] you're using an old version of Go (v1.16) for a better experience update to the latest v1.18)

cc @sio4 @stanislas-m @fasmat

[sio4]

I agree with you, especially the following sentence. That is what I wanted to say in the previous discussion about version support. I think we should not be captured by consideration for the old versions while we don't need to proactively/intentionally break things.

This would mean that while Buffalo may still work with Go v1.16 we will not keep that version into consideration while developing (nor our test suites).

I will soon update the test cases not to test against 1.16 anymore. (already done for stand-alone tests such as for pop and fizz)

One concern that came to me while I was considering updating go.mod file is that the go.mod format for 1.17 or higher is not easy to find an intentional version fix with an indirect comment directive. Any idea?

See also: gobuffalo/buffalo#2264

[sio4]

just updated the standard test case which is used by all packages except pop and fizz. so from now tests will run for only 1.17 and 1.18.