Docker Image Tagging Confusion

[pahansen95]

I was having issues running Adam in Docker on a t4g instance in AWS. After running around in circles trying to figure out what I was doing wrong I realized after looking at the Docker tags that latest was released 5 months ago.

Looking at your GitHub Workflows I see you don't tag any image as latest. Would it make sense to add the tag under the publish workflow?

Alternatively, you could call out in the README one should explicitly define a tag. Currently all of the examples just use lfedge/adam.

I'd be happy to make a pull request either way.

[rvs]

This is excellent point @pahansen95 ! @deitch @giggsoff -- any thoughts on this?

[giggsoff]

I think it is good idea to add latest tag to the publish workflow. Feel free to open PR for this.

[deitch]

I do have an opinion on it, but I am not 100% sure it is correct, so open to discussion.

I never have loved the mutable latest tag; it causes more pain than it is worth. That having been said, lots of people use it, so we might have to live with it.

However, living with it means we should decide where it goes. In my opinion, latest (if it must exist) should go only on the latests released version, i.e. one with an actual version tag, and not on the head of master branch. In other words, it should be part of the release workflow, rather than the publish workflow.

If we need a mutable tag pointing to the latest head, we can add one for that as well.

All of that having been said, this is important:

you could call out in the README one should explicitly define a tag. Currently all of the examples just use lfedge/adam.

We could, and probably should. Is it wrong, though, for us to call out to use the latest released version? Or perhaps we need to be releasing more often. :-)

[pahansen95]

If nothing else the latest tag in Docker Hub should probably be removed for now. I think it's safe to assume people trying out the project are following the README & will pull the latest tag if using Docker.

[deitch]

I think @pahansen95 raises an important issue: the docs are confusing, because we don't have anything sane that latest points to. We don't want latest to point at HEAD of master branch, because that would change too rapidly and be confusing. But we do want something reasonable so users aren't confused.

As an aside, thank you for sharing it @pahansen95, so that we can avoid others also running around in circles.

I propose the following:

• latest should point, always, at the most recent semver release
• master should point to HEAD of mainline branch
• (probably most important of all) we should cut release and keep doing so

To a large degree, this is an outcome of our not cutting releases.

I would like to hear feedback from the 3 others on this issue before implementing.

[rvs]

FWIW @deitch -- EVE itself follows a slightly tweaked version of the above:

• latest should point, always, at the most recent semver release
• snapshot should point to HEAD of mainline branch

I'd suggest whatever we do we need to make it the same between EVE and Adam. Otherwise confusion will abound.

[deitch]

That makes sense. We will follow that with adam.

We really should document this somewhere so that future projects (maybe eden too?) can have a written standard to follow.