Unlike large version control system like git, hg, or svn, you don't have to install any version control tool for using gpm; you are still able to download and install packages that you prefer to.
With gpm, it's much easier to control dependencies version of your packages specifically. All you need to do is that indicate version either by tag, branch or commit of your dependencies, and leave rest of work to gpm!
-`go get` gives great advantages of package installation in Go, but the only thing it's missing is version control of dependencies.
- Every time you use `go get`, you may download unstable version of your package dependencies, and you may waste your time to find last version in almost unreadable commit history.
- Not only main package, dependencies also have their dependencies, in a big project, small things like this should not waste your attention for building awesome applications.
In gpm, we call `bundle` for this kind of files, here is an example of a [bundle](https://github.com/GPMGo/gpm/blob/master/repo/bundles/test_bundle.json), don't get it? It's fine, we'll talk about it more just one second.
- gopm is a `go get` able project: execute command `go get github.com/GPMGo/gopm` to download and install.
- Run test: switch work directory to gopm project, and execute command `go test` to build and test commands automatically(for now, tested commands are `gopm install`, `gopm remove`).
- Add gopm project path to your environment variable `PATH` in order to execute it in other directories.
**Attention** If you install from source, you can actually put binary in any path that has already existed in $PATH, so you don't need to add a new path to $PATH again.
Because we don't have all kinds of operating systems, we need your help to complete following download list!(I'm just too lazy to cross compiling -_-|||)
**Attention** Because we use API to get information of packages that are hosted on github.com, but it limits 60 requests per hour, so you may get errors if you download too much(more than 50 packages per hour). We do not provider access token for security reason, but we do have configure option `github_access_token` in configuration file `conf/gopm.toml`, so you can go to [here](https://github.com/settings/applications) and create your personal access token(up to 5000 request per hour), and set it in `gopm.toml`.
- Execute command `gpm install github.com/GPMGoTest/install_test`, and you do not need to install version control tool. In case you want to, `gpm install -v github.com/GPMGoTest/install_test` calls `go get` in underlying.
- Where is the `test.b` comes from? We actually created a bundle for you in directory `repo/bundles/`, and all bundles should be put there.
- This is how bundle works, you can open it and see what's inside, it includes import path, type, value and dependencies.
- The `test.b` means the bundle whose name is `test`, if you want to use bundle, you have to add suffix `.b`. You may notice that our file name is `install_test.json`, why is `test`? Because we use `bundle_name` inside file, file name doesn't mean anything unless you leave `bundle_name` blank, then the file name becomes bundle name automatically, but be sure that all bundle file name should use JSON and suffix `.json`.
- For `code.google.com`, `launchpad.net`, type is **ALWAYS**`commit`, and you can leave value blank which means up-to-date, or give it a certain value and you will download the same version of the package no matter how many times.
- For `github.com`, `bitbucket.org`, type can be either `commit`, `branch` or `tag`, and give it corresponding value.
- Now, you should have two packages which are `github.com/GPMGoTest/install_test` and `github.com/GPMGoTest/install_test2` in your computer.
In some cases like building web applications, we use relative path to access static files, and `go build` compiles packages without saving, so it's a shortcut for `go install` + `go build` + `go run`, and you don't need to compile packages again for those have not changed.
- You may notice this is not project path, it's OK because gpm knows it, and deletes directory `$GOPATH/src/github.com/GPMGoTest/install_test2/`, this command delete files in `$GOPATH/bin` and `$GOPATH/pkg` as well.
- You can also use `gopm remove test.b` to remove all packages are included in bundle, but we don't need here because we have one more cool stuff to try.