The blog post mentions some of this. It claims " For a long time, we believed that the problem of package versioning would be best solved by an add-on tool, and

The blog post mentions some of this. It claims " For a long time, we believed that the problem of package versioning would be best solved by an add-on tool, and we encouraged people to create one. The Go community created many tools with different approaches" These many tools were the thrash, including godep, gb, glide, dep, and more. Each of these expressed versions with different manifests, many of them could import other format's, but not all. All-in-all it has been a mess. Sure, the go team has not officially done much, but that's because their stance has been borderline negligent on the topic.