What happened

When running make lint or executing the testing suite locally under modern versions of Golang (Go 1.25+), the golangci-lint runner abruptly fails due to two independent issues:

1. Viper configuration unmarshal failure

   • The .golangci.yml contains an invalid top-level field:

     version: "2"

   • Viper strictly expects structured maps/dictionaries and fails while unmarshaling this field.
   • This causes the following error:

     ERRO Can't read config: can't unmarshal config by viper: 1 error(s) decoding:
     * 'Version' expected a map, got 'string'
     

2. AST parsing panic from outdated Go linter logic

   • After bypassing the config issue, the pinned golangci-lint@v1.51.2 binary still crashes.
   • The crash occurs because its AST engine is incompatible with modern Go compiler releases.
   • Panic source:

     github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/pkg/golinters/goanalysis.analyzeRecursive...
     

What you expected to happen

Running make lint should correctly download a stable, compatible version of golangci-lint and statically inspect the codebase without abruptly crashing due to:

• internal Viper configuration parsing failures
• AST parsing panics on modern Go releases

How to reproduce the bug

1. Ensure your local Go environment is Go 1.25.x or higher
2. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/openkruise/kruise.git
   cd kruise

3. Run:

   make lint

How to fix

1) Fix .golangci.yml

Remove the invalid field at the top of the file:

version: "2"

2) Update Makefile

Bump the GOLANGCI_LINT binary target on line 133 from:

v1.51.2

to a stable compatible release such as:

v1.61.0

Environment details

• OS: Mac / Linux
• Go Version: 1.25.6