Move experimental to latest? about images HOT 9 CLOSED

@amouat

my .2c is that we should start everything with experimental until we have confidence, either through our own testing or usage, that the image is ready.

from images.

I think there are two separate things here; status shown on the page and tags for images. My take:

• Any image which still needs testing should make this clear on the github page. We should probably have a standard status field for each of them e.g. alpha/beta/stable or similar.
• All images should have a latest tag. I think atm we have some images that have "experimental" tags and no "latest" tag, but I'm not sure this is really helpful. A lot of people will try docker pull cgr.dev/chainguard/bazel with no tag, which will fail and frustrate them, even though we may have something that will work for them. If it doesn't, they will go to the github, see it's experimental and hopefully open an issue or at least forgive us.

That being said, the latest tag should point to a "stable" version of the image. For example, we don't want to overwrite the current static:latest image with the wolfi one as it doesn't have all architectures right now. Also, we don't want latest to point to "edge" or "beta" releases if that's not the standard version that's used.

from images.

Yeah, that sounds like a plan. status: experimental/stable makes most sense to me. And defaulting to stable.

from images.

I don't have a strong opinion but I did wonder if we needed a way to indicate that we are looking for feedback, so folks should not rely on a particular image. latest probably has a different meaning to that. But TBH if you prefer to stick with latest then that sounds fine really.

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@amouat I hadn't thought about folks using a naked pull. We have WIP images that I worry folks would use blindly w/ potentially quite bad results, but if it's SOP for images that are still alpha level to have @latest tag than I'm fine with making sure we document our image readiness using other means. We have an issue open related to this https://github.com/chainguard-dev/internal/issues/962

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I think we need to keep in mind how people will discover our images. In most cases they will come via the GitHub pages, so as long as we're clear there, I think we're good.

from images.

all makes sense. I think we ought to add a field to image.yaml to then indicate the image on the readme.

Is experimental: true enough? Or do we want various states? E.g. status: stable, status: alpha, ...

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or the other direction, stable: false (defaulting to true)

from images.

Opened #84

Will leave this one open to track the move for experimental images to use latest tag

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