Right now, we only have linker patches for Go 1.22.x.
We only ever maintain those for one or two major Go versions at a time.
If a user tries to use the Go toolchain from 1.21, we already fail
with "Go version too old" messages early on, but we don't for 1.23,
causing a relatively confusing error later on when we link a binary:
cannot get modified linker: cannot retrieve linker patches: open patches/go1.23: file does not exist
Instead, fail early and with a good error message.
Go 1.21.0 was released in August 2023, so our upcoming release
will no longer support the Go 1.20 release series.
The first Go 1.22 release candidate is also due in December 2023,
less than a month from now, so dropping 1.20 will simplify 1.22 work.
The first makes our test scripts more consistent, as all external
program executions happen via "exec" and are not as easily confused
with custom builtin commands like our "generate-literals".
The second catches mistakes if any of our txtar files have duplicate
files, where all but one of the contents would be ignored before.
Go master, the upcoming Go 1.21, has had its merge window open for over
two weeks at this point, and it seems calmer at this point.
ALso update staticcheck to its latest release, which supports Go 1.20.
Following the best practices from upstream.
In particular, the "txt" extension is somewhat ambiguous.
This may cause some conflicts due to the git diff noise,
but hopefully we won't ever do this again.
Daniel Martí