Google Just Did a Pad-Left on Go (For App Engine)
github.com"pad-left" is not just "somebody changed some code we depend on", it was a trivial little library that was removed and broke half the npm world. Libraries change and code breaks, that's not news.
Plus the Go community's quasi-official position as of 1.4.2 was still that you should vendor your dependencies, and "you should vendor your code" is the official position now. If your code broke because of a remote commit on the internet, that's your build system's problem, not the internet's.
My Google Product (which is fully supported) broke because of a Google commit
I see and acknowledge that. That is not a "pad-left" issue. That is "a commit broke my code". If that set off a pad-left sized reaction every time it happened HN would be nothing but "commits that broke code" on the front page every day.
I assume you weren't vendoring before... are you vendoring now?
For the sake of the argument lets say I vendor my code (notice that this is 1.4.2 golang and most vendoring tools were formed around 1.5), This doesn't help a guy that tries today to start a new project on Google AppEngine/Go using Google code. Major functionality is broken in the sense that he can't compile his code. Google Samples (and from official documentation) is broken. How vending helps in that case?
It's a shame that app engine is still running on go 1.4.2, I would have understand if it was using 1.5 (since 1.6 is still quite new) but 1.4.2 still uses the old and slow GC. And now this...
If you pay attention to where AppEngine is getting love these days, it's moving towards Google-accessing libraries on VMs, and becoming relatively language-agnostic. The just released Node.js libs, and other languages are coming.