The //indirect dependencies I believe are just there to track dependencies that are not in the project, or to help with caching: https://github.com/golang/go/is

The //indirect dependencies I believe are just there to track dependencies that are not in the project, or to help with caching: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/36460 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/36460 In go 1.17 they were added so that project loading did not require downloading the go.mod of every dependency in the graph.