setup-envtest@latest requires golang >=1.25.0?

[stevenhorsman]

In the latest release of setup-envtest@latest from this morning our pipelines (which are running on Go 1.24.7) have started reporting failures with installing setup-envtest@latest:

go install sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime/tools/setup-envtest@latest
go: downloading sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime/tools/setup-envtest v0.0.0-20251014082336-b8f11375258f
go: downloading sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime v0.22.3
go: sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime/tools/setup-envtest@latest: sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime/tools/setup-envtest@v0.0.0-20251014082336-b8f11375258f requires go >= 1.25.0 (running go 1.24.7; GOTOOLCHAIN=local)

The docs:

controller-runtime/tools/setup-envtest/README.md

Lines 7 to 12 in b8f1137

	To use it, just go-install it with Golang 1.24+ (it's a separate, self-contained
	module):
	```shell
	go install sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime/tools/setup-envtest@latest
	```

still seem to suggest that the latest will work with 1.24, so is the documentation wrong and we need to pin the version we are using, or was the dependency bump unintentional?

Thanks!

[sbueringer]

We should probably drop the documentation that tells folks to use setup-envtest from main. This just sounds like a very bad idea as we can't guarantee that main doesn't change.

We bumped the main branch of controller-runtime intentionally to Go 1.25 as we bumped to the first Kubernetes 1.35 alpha.

For stability I would recommend to either pin to a release branch or consume the binaries that we publish as part of controller-runtime releases.

[stevenhorsman]

Thanks for the response. Which branch would you recommend? - Will release-0.22 have the 1.25 change merged into it, or is that safe to stick with?

[sbueringer]

I would use release-0.22. We don't bump k8s.io/* library and Go minor versions on release branches

[stevenhorsman]

Great - thanks for the approach, feel free to close this issue, or leave as a place-holder to update the doc's guidance, whichever is most helpful to the project.

[sbueringer]

I'll leave it open, it makes sense to update the doc