I don't know much / anything about ruby package management, but if it's commonplace for ruby packages to change the LOAD_PATH (which I guess is similar to PYTHO

I don't know much / anything about ruby package management, but if it's commonplace for ruby packages to change the LOAD_PATH (which I guess is similar to PYTHON_PATH / sys.path in python ?), that is really quite magical (by which I mean, causes unexpected behavior). What conroy is talking about is creating a static set of dependencies that you check into your own source control, because go doesn't let you specify e.g. github commit hashes to "pin" a package dependency to a certain revision. So a workaround for that is to (as a one-off) change your GOPATH ($GOPATH/src and $GOPATH/bin is where the standard "go get" / "go install" etc put things) to something temporary, "go get" your dependences (which will fetch them from github or wherever at the HEAD revision). Now run your test suite to make sure everything passes. If it does, great, take the current $GOPATH/src and check the contents of that into your own revision control. Et voila, ghetto-"pin"ning.