Comment 1:

GOPATH will not do ~ expansion.
Your claim that "POSIX systems" do this is false. Only bash does this,
and we can't possibly keep up with all the magic that bash does. If
you have an Ubuntu system, try dash or ksh or pdksh and you'll see
that ~ expansion within the variable is quite uncommon.

Status changed to Unfortunate.

Comment 2 by stefantalpalaru:

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_06_01

Comment 3:

The link describes tilde expansion as a property of the shell input syntax.
Instead of writing
    GOPATH="~/go:~/go_mine"
you should write
    GOPATH=~/go:~/go_mine
and then the shell will expand the ~ when creating the environment
variable. This already works, because it doesn't have anything to do
with the go command.
What you asked for in this issue is to be able to write the quoted
version, creating an environment variable that itself contains ~, and
force every program that looks at the environment variable to apply
the tilde expansion itself. That is not required by POSIX, and it is
not done by any shell I could find, except bash, which does
everything.
Russ

Comment 4 by stefantalpalaru:

Dropping the quotes is good enough for me. Can we get an example and a note about tilde
expansion not working inside the quotes on this page: http://golang.org/doc/code.html ?

Comment 5:

I don't believe the page should or needs to say anything about tilde
expansion not working inside quotes, especially given that it does not
use either one in the examples. I'm sorry you ran into trouble, but
tilde expansion pretty much never works inside quotes. This is a fact
of Unix, not of Go. (Bash's $PATH interpretation is the anomaly here.)

Comment 6:

What about windows. Do not forget about windows :-)
Alex

Comment 7:

Thanks Alex. All the more reason not to give ~ special meaning. Just
don't write the quotes, and it will work for all the tools you are
using, Go and otherwise, and all the environment variables you need to
set. The rule is simple: if you quote ~ it doesn't get expanded.

Comment 8 by dan.carley:

Is it possible to at least surface this error more clearly?
As a newcomer using `go get` to try out gotour - it appears that Go fails to create the
directory structure in GOPATH, but the first and only sign of this is when hg (in this
case) tries to clone a repo into the expanded path:
dan@dan-MBP ~/projects/personal $ mkdir golang
dan@dan-MBP ~/projects/personal $ export GOPATH="~/projects/personal/golang"
dan@dan-MBP ~/projects/personal $ go get -v -x code.google.com/p/go-tour/gotour
code.google.com/p/go-tour (download)
cd .
hg clone -U https://code.google.com/p/go-tour
~/projects/personal/golang/src/code.google.com/p/go-tour
# cd .; hg clone -U https://code.google.com/p/go-tour
~/projects/personal/golang/src/code.google.com/p/go-tour
abort: No such file or directory:
/home/dan/projects/personal/golang/src/code.google.com/p/go-tour/.hg
package code.google.com/p/go-tour/gotour: exit status 255

Comment 9:

The output in comment 8 is mysterious indeed. Let's at least make it clearer what is
happening. I would hope that since the first (only) directory in $GOPATH does not exist,
we should give an error about that instead of trying to invoke hg.

Labels changed: added priority-later, go1.1, removed priority-triage.

Status changed to Accepted.

Comment 10:

Labels changed: added size-s.

Comment 11:

On my Ubuntu system setting GOPATH="~/foobar" leads to some weird behaviour. With the
example above it seems the go tool creates $HOME/~/foobar/src/code.google.com/p, which
seems like the right thing to do (although slightly unexpected to some people...) if you
are not expanding the ~.
However as in the example above it when it calls the mercurial command:
hg clone -U https://code.google.com/p/go-tour ~/foobar/src/code.google.com/p/go-tour
the error message is:
abort: No such file or directory: /home/kamil/foobar/src/code.google.com/p/go-tour/.hg
which seems to imply that Mercurial does its own tilde expansion and so the paths don't
match.

Comment 12:

Let's just reject any GOPATH containing a ~ character.

Comment 13:

This issue was closed by revision 8b6534b.

Status changed to Fixed.

Comment 14 by jrnieder:

This fix broke the build of a package sitting in the directory
/tmp/buildd/git-1.8.2~rc3/. Would a patch to only reject ~ at the beginning of GOPATH
and after : make sense?

Comment 15:

Will fix.

Comment 16:

This issue was closed by revision ffbcd89.