Should CI use the oldest or newest version of go

[codeboten]

This discussion has come up a few times and I'm opening an issue to make a decision and move forward. The CI tooling in many places uses go 1.23 today, and renovate wants to bump the dependency to go 1.24.

In the past we've held back on updating the go version used in CI. Was this for a good reason? Our unit tests run against both N and N-1 versions of go. Are there other workflows that would benefit from a matrix to ensure compatibility?

This will force cmd to use 1.24 toolchain: http://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/actions/runs/15419616369/job/43390970177?pr=13135#step:13:55

or is it not a problem?

Originally posted by @songy23 in #13135 (comment)

[songy23]

Our unit tests run against both N and N-1 versions of go. Are there other workflows that would benefit from a matrix to ensure compatibility?

IMO, we should keep the N and N-1 matrix for unit tests, all the other CIs should be fine to use the newest version of go