There are two different types of updating an Azul3D package. One is where you wish to update to a newer and better package API (if one is available), and the other is where you wish to receive bug fixes or new features for the latest available version of a package.
Any time API-incompatible changes must be made to an existing package, a new version is created.
Once a new version of a package is available, previous versions receive no further updates. As such it is important to periodically update your applications to newer versions of Azul3D packages. For example if an application imported the following package:
import "azul3d.org/chippy.v1"
And a newer version is available, (the package’s documentation would mention if a newer version was available). You would want to change each import statement to the newer version:
import "azul3d.org/chippy.v2
This can be a very tedious task if you have many imports. To make it significantly easier you can use the govers tool. To do this you first need to install it using the Go tool:
go get github.com/rogpeppe/govers
And then in the root of the source tree you want to change, you would run:
govers azul3d.org/chippy.v2
Which would rewrite all of the v1 import paths to become v2. It will also warn you if you are importing code that uses a previous version of the same package -- which is a big no no.
This just rewrites the import paths -- updating your code to the latest package version means that the API has changed and you’ll need to do some manual fixing yourself still.
It’s also possible to use govers to switch back-and-forth between the unstable and stable branch of a package:
# switch from pkg.v3 to pkg.v3-unstable
govers azul3d.org/pkg.v3-unstable
# switch back to pkg.v3
govers azul3d.org/pkg.v3
When we don’t have to make API-incompatible changes, we don’t. Instead these changes are made to the latest released version of the package.
So for instance: version one of the chippy package (azul3d.org/chippy.v1), may still receive bug fixes and new features as time goes on. You can track these changes easily through the package’s GitHub repository.
Downloading all of the recent changes to a specific package is very easy to do using the update flag with the go get command:
go get -u azul3d.org/chippy.v1
If you want to update all of the Azul3D packages that you have downloaded, it is also easy using … file path expansion, like so:
go get -u azul3d.org/...
Which would update every Azul3D package that you have installed.