Cosmovisor 1.7.3 exists only to ship the binaries 1.7.2 forgot
Victoria Shinder1 min readCosmovisor v1.7.3 has been released for one reason: to make prebuilt binaries available for the fix that shipped in v1.7.2. That fix addressed builds with Go 1.26 and later failing with an invalid reference to encoding/json.unquoteBytes; the v1.7.2 GitHub release did not include the binaries.
What it means
An operator running Cosmovisor to manage validator upgrades is exactly the user least likely to be building from source, so a fix that exists only as source is, for that audience, not a fix at all. The release is a reminder that for infrastructure tooling the artefact is the product and the commit is not.
The underlying breakage is worth noting on its own: a reference into encoding/json internals that a Go release moved. Depending on an unexported symbol works until a toolchain upgrade, and the people who then discover it are the ones who upgraded Go for unrelated reasons.