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staletools

staletools

staletools

Which installed Go tools were built with an older toolchain, and, of those, which actually parse Go source, because only for those is staleness a wrong answer rather than an old binary. Repository → Latest tag: v0.3.0; this page is written from its README at that tag.

$ staletools
READ GO SOURCE and are behind go1.27.1 — these do not fail, they MISREPORT:
  gopls                  go1.26.4     ~/go/bin
                         go install golang.org/x/tools/gopls@latest
  ...

INSTALLED TWICE with different toolchains — PATH order decides which runs:
  agentsync
      go1.27.1     ~/.local/bin
      go1.26.4     ~/go/bin

81 Go tool(s), 29 behind go1.27.1, 8 of those read Go source

(An excerpt of the README’s example, measured on its author’s machine.)

Exit
0no source-reading tool is behind, and nothing is shadowed
1something is behind or shadowed
2refused: a directory that cannot be read

Install and usage 

go install github.com/go-fleettools/staletools@latest
staletools [-all] [-want go1.27.1] [dir...]

With no directory it looks at $GOBIN (or $GOPATH/bin, or ~/go/bin) and ~/.local/bin. -want compares against another toolchain: “what would be stale if we moved to this?”. It has no dependency beyond the standard library.

Why the distinction

A CLI built with go1.26 runs under a go1.27 toolchain: it is old, not broken. But a tool that analyses Go source embeds go/types and go/parser from its build toolchain, and built with go1.26 it cannot read go1.27: it emits type errors about the standard library and then reports on whatever it managed to load, so the output reads like findings. staletools finds those tools from the dependency list of the binary (golang.org/x/tools, honnef.co/go/tools and the like), not from a list of names. It also reports a tool installed in two directories with different toolchains. The totals are always printed, zeros included.

-releases 

staletools -releases

The default axis asks what a tool was built with; this one asks what it is: which installed tools are an older release of themselves. A marker → flags those in a directory the shell searches, ahead of those in one nothing reads. The oracle is go list -m -versions, not a tag listing, and a tool built from an unreleased commit is reported under its own heading rather than mislabelled as behind.

prwaitmodfloor