I’m not planning to publish the latest tag anymore if we provide multiple jdk versions.
Actually I changed my mind on this and I think we should continue to provide a latest tag.
The caveat with that floating tag is that it would point to the baseline JDK version that we provide. For example for upcoming images that will be built with JDK 11 and JDK 17, “latest” will point to “latest-jdk11”.
That seems odd to me. If we're going to continue to have 'latest' it seems intuitive it would mean 'latest JDK' as well.
I get keeping 'latest' as 'JDK 11' for compatibility, and maybe that's fine right now as these changes haven't been socialized widely. But if we do that I think we should also announce that at point XXX (some time soon) the meaning of 'latest' will change to 'latest supported JDK’.Ok,
Ok, we can put use “latest” to point to the most recent version of JDK (so JDK17 now).
I find it more disruptive this way. As soon as we introduce e.g. JDK19, the users will switch from JDK 17 to JDK 19 without notice.
Tangent: are you considering non-LTS SE versions?
Keeping latest on the baseline JDK leaves more time for users to change their JDK settings.
LTS discussion aside, this is a good point -- timing of introducing a new image != timing of wanting people to move.
In any case, I’d recommend to switch to latest-jdk11 or latest-jdk17 to avoid any abrupt changes of JDK versions that we can have with latest.
+1; that's probably the main thing; communicate that people should move off 'latest' as it doesn't have a particularly clear meaning. Keeping it on SE 11 is fine, even for as long as we support 11. If that proves too confusing for people, we can adjust later (drop it, move it to 17 just because, etc) and we've given plenty of notice that 'latest' isn't recommended.
Jeff
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Jeff Mesnil
Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat