The new "vendor" system is basically that the Go compiler will look in vendor/ for your import before trying to traverse the GOPATH. This means you can manually

The new "vendor" system is basically that the Go compiler will look in vendor/ for your import before trying to traverse the GOPATH. This means you can manually download and freeze dependencies there. However, Go leaves the management of this vendor directory to you or some hypothetical helper tool — or with git submodules, for that matter. "go get", for example, still works just like before (ie., stores stuff in $GOPATH/src).