go mod graph failing where go mod download succeeds

[thediveo]

This is rather kind of experience feedback. In some of my use cases, go mod graph works beautifully. However, in some others, it is slower than go mod download and might even have issues or might trigger infrastructure issues.

For instance, go mod graph fails only after lots of dependency downloads with error status 123 on some dependency, where go mod download repeatedly succeeds without any error messages. I don't understand yet if this signals a hidden issue with the project dependencies or not.

The affected project pulls in a module of which it only needs a small part of. However, the pulled in module has a big fish in its dependencies, the k8s client. As it seems, go mod download does this as fast or slightly faster than go get. In contrast, go mod graph does a very thorough run on the full dependency graph and might also find issues, which go get and go mod download might not trip upon, depending on which parts of the dependencies are really needed in your applications.

Others might be able to explain this much better than me, with much less misunderstandings.