Docker Image Tags for Major Versions

[Akorian]

Enhancement

I noticed that the Docker images in the GitHub registry do not appear to provide tags for major versions.

For example, it would be useful to have a tag such as v7 that always points to the latest release within the v7 major version.
This would allow users to pin their deployments to a specific major version while still receiving automatic minor and patch updates. At the same time, it would prevent an automatic upgrade to a future major version such as v8.

Since major-version upgrades are the ones most likely to introduce breaking changes, this would have a few advantages:

• Administrators would no longer need to manually update an exact version pin for every minor or patch release.
• Users could continue receiving compatible updates automatically.
• It would provide a safer alternative to using latest, which may eventually move to a new major version and potentially introduce breaking changes.

For example:

ghcr.io/lycheeorg/lychee:v7

could automatically move from v7.1.0 to v7.2.0, v7.3.1, etc., but would never automatically upgrade to v8.

Would it be possible to provide and maintain major-version tags like v7, v8, and so on?

[ildyria]

Hi, to be honest, I see the minor attractiveness for it. This is under the assumption that Lychee follows semantic versioning, and in short we don't. 🙈

We follow pride versioning:

Aside from the version 3 to version 4 which was quite a big change in the php interface (we literally had two repositories for the backend) and the version 6 to 7 which had a complete update on the docker image core where the users had to change the volume mount paths, all other major update had no build breakers.

I can also guarantee you that the next major version will not have build breakers from the version 7.
I can't say anything about the version 9 yet though, but we really really try to avoid build breaking.
To give you an idea of how far we go with this, I am 99% confident that a database that is still on version 3.16~18... would be able to migrate to the latest version without hickups.

The other thing is that we do not provide patch/back-port fixes for older versions, we follow a rolling forward only.

[ildyria]

PS: if a poor soul feel like proposing a pull request for the change somewhere around here:
https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee/blob/master/.github/workflows/CICD.yml#L285
It is likely to be merged. :)

[ildyria]

Done.