Hi Michael,
I'm in contact with upstream and we agreed that this dependency in not worth the trouble keeping we agreed that for Debian, the best way to proceed would be to use the buildtag containers_image_ostree_stub which disables the package "
github.com/containers/image/ostree".
As your recommendations in the other email thread, I've added the -tag option to the dh_auto_build invocation. That appears to work fine.
However, the package build fails at the invocation of dh_golang. If I understand the utility correctly, it invokes "go list" two times: The first time to identify the golang packages that needs to be installed into the Debian package, and a second time to identify what files are involved? (Sorry, Perl is not my forte, and I think some commentary in the source code on the thinking behind the '$tmpl' and '$gofiletmpl' variables that are being passed to "go list" would be very valuable).
If I understand the control flow correctly, it is the 2nd invocation that crashes with this error message: