If go.sum has "no observable effect on builds", you don't know what you're building and go can download and run unverified code.
I'm not a go developer and must be misunderstanding something...
I think it's coz not EVERY language's lockfile comes with checksum
So, Go's go.mod is functionally equivalent Ruby Gem lockfile (that doesn't have checksum) but need to get go.sum to be equivalent to npm's (that does come with checksum)
Author just compared it to languages where lockfile means just version lock
From my understanding
its stored forever in the proxy cache and your new tag will never be fetched by users who go through the language's centralized infrastructure (i.e. proxy).
go can also validate the checksums (go.sum) against the languages central infrastructure that associates version->checksums.
i.e. if you cut a release, realize you made a mistake and try to fix it quitely, no user will ever see it if even one user saw the previous version (and that one user is probably you, as you probably fetched it through the proxy to see the mistake)
This is mistaken. The Go module proxy doesn't make any guarantee that it will permanently store the checksum for any given module. From the outside, we would expect that their policy is to only ever delete checksums for modules that haven't been fetched in a long time. But in general, you should not base your security model on the notion that these checksums are stored permanently.
Incorrect. Checksums are stored forever, in a Merkle Tree, meaning if the proxy were to ever delete a checksum, it would be detected (and yes, people like me are checking - https://sourcespotter.com/sumdb).
Like any code host, the proxy does not guarantee that the code for a module will be available forever, since code may have to be removed for legal reasons.
But you absolutely can rely on the checksum being preserved and thus you can be sure you'll never be given different code for a particular version.
For the question “is the data in the checksum database immutable” you can trust people like the parent, who double checks what Google is doing.
For the question “is it the same data that can be downloaded directly from the repos” you can skip the proxy to download dependencies, then do it again with the proxy, and compare.
So I'd say you don't need to trust Google at all in this case.
If Google were to present you with a different view of the Merkle Tree with different checksums in it, they'd have to forever show you, and only you, that view. If they accidentally show someone else that view, or show you the real view, the go command would detect it. This will eventually be strengthened further with witnessing[2], which will ensure that everyone's view of the log is the same. In the meantime, you / your coworker can upload your view of the log (in $GOPATH/pkg/sumdb/sum.golang.org/latest) to Source Spotter and it will tell you if it's consistent with its view:
$ curl --data-binary "@$(go env GOPATH)/pkg/sumdb/sum.golang.org/latest" https://gossip.api.sourcespotter.com/sum.golang.org
consistent: this STH is consistent with other STHs that we've seen from sum.golang.org
How long the google-run module cache (aka, module proxy or module mirror) at https://proxy.golang.org caches the contents of modules is I think slightly nuanced.
That page includes:
> Whenever possible, the mirror aims to cache content in order to avoid breaking builds for people that depend on your package
But that page also discusses how modules might need to be removed for legal reasons or if a module does not have a known Open Source license:
> proxy.golang.org does not save all modules forever. There are a number of reasons for this, but one reason is if proxy.golang.org is not able to detect a suitable license. In this case, only a temporarily cached copy of the module will be made available, and may become unavailable if it is removed from the original source and becomes outdated.
If interested, there's a good overview of how it all works in one of the older official announcement blog posts (in particular, the "Module Index", "Module Authentication", "Module Mirrors" sections there):
2) you're right, glanced at kubernetes (been a long time since I worked on it) and they still have a vendor directory that gets updated regularly.
Thanks for that link.
Based on reading through that whole discussion there just now and my understanding of the different ecosystems, my conclusion is that certainly people there are telling Filippo Valsorda that he is misunderstanding how things work in other languages, but then AFAICT Filippo or others chime in to explain how he is in fact not misunderstanding.
This subthread to me was a seemingly prototypical exchange there:
https://lobste.rs/s/exv2eq/go_sum_is_not_lockfile#c_d26oq4
Someone in that subthread tells Filippo (FiloSottile) that he is misunderstanding cargo behavior, but Filippo then reiterates which behavior he is talking about (add vs. install), Filippo does a simple test to illustrate his point, and some others seem to agree that he is correct in what he originally said.
That said, YMMV, and that overall discussion does certainly seem to have some confusion and people seemingly talking past each other (e.g., some people mixing up "dependents" vs. "dependencies", etc.).
I don't get this impression. Rather, as you say, I get the impression that people are talking past each other, a property which also extends to the author, and the overall failure to reach a mutual understanding of terms only contributes to muddying the waters all around. Here's a direct example that's still in the OP:
"The lockfile (e.g. uv.lock, package-lock.json, Cargo.lock) is a relatively recent innovation in some ecosystems, and it lists the actual versions used in the most recent build. It is not really human-readable, and is ignored by dependents, allowing the rapid spread of supply-chain attacks."
At the end there, what the author is talking about has nothing to do with lockfiles specifically, let alone when they are applied or ignored, but rather to do with the difference between minimum-version selection (which Go uses) and max-compatible-version selection.
Here's another one:
"In other ecosystems, package resolution time going down below 1s is celebrated"
This is repeating the mistaken claims that Russ Cox made years ago when he designed Go's current packaging system. Package resolution in e.g. Cargo is almost too fast to measure, even on large dependency trees.