GoDoc and Public API

[jmank88]

There are currently many undocumented, exported members in the top level package dep - GoDoc.

Is there a long term plan for this package's public API?
Was there a design to the current state, or were things just made public as needed by commands?

In its current form, some exported members could use simple comments, others could perhaps be made unexported or internal, and some pieces have evolved and could use small API tweaks, even if only to fix things like stale names.

Unless I missed an existing conversation, this issue can be a central place to discuss the GoDoc and Public API, and to link incremental PRs.

I have an incoming PR for general documentation and specific changes to Ctx and Loggers.

[carolynvs]

Related issues (none that answer this really good question though): #527 #594 #575. I'd really like for us decide what is exported (and documented) for now, even if we go a different direction in a later milestone.

[sdboyer]

Yeah, we need some real thought around this.

My off-the-cuff thoughts:

1. dep should primarily concern itself with exporting:
   1. Its concrete representations of gps' required types, e.g. Lock, Manifest, and ProjectAnalyzer
   2. Logic for loading up a "project", as dep defines it
   3. Logic for preparing a gps.SolveParameters in the same way dep does it (absent CLI arguments)
   4. maybe the logic for writing out state (so, the SafeWriter). "maybe" because this is arguably something that we should treat as "the tool is the API", in much the way the go tool does.
2. dep should avoid exporting anything that's not strictly necessary for the above
3. gps is already designed and mostly documented as a self-contained API. We should aim to keep it self-contained, expanding it with functionality from dep when there is an operation that is agnostic to any of dep's specific assumptions.

[sdboyer]

(implicit in the above is that we should re-export gps)

[jmank88]

Any thoughts on whether func PruneProject should remain exported?
If exported, then would it make sense as a method? (*Project) Prune(...)
If unexported, then the whole thing can move into cmd/dep/prune.go. I suspect using (*pruneCommand) Run() if possible would be encouraged over calling PruneProject directly anyways.

[sdboyer]

We can unexport it - the plan is to shift that behavior more directly into dep ensure. See #120 (comment).