Upgrade alpine to 3.5

[wolverian]

No description provided.

[Starefossen]

Hi @wolverian and thank you for your contribution to the docker-node project.

Regarding the upgrade to Alpine v3.5 there already exists an discussion in #298 where it was decided to postpone the upgrade of Alpine due to downstream packages depending on the node image until Node.js 8 has been released.

[wolverian]

Hi @Starefossen! Thank you for the reply. I don't understand the motivation not to update the image as often as possible, but of course that's not my call.

[LaurentGoderre]

@Starefossen @chorrell what about creating a alpha branch and creating separate tags for those. It would allow those who want cutting edge to get it without sacrificing the current setup.

[Starefossen]

@wolverian the motivation is stability, if you do a GitHub search for FROM node alpine you'll understand what I am talking about. And those are only the public images. There are some incompatibilities between Alpine 3.4 and 3.5 hence the required major version bump.

[Starefossen]

@LaurentGoderre another possibility would be to also version the alpine variant like:

• node:6-alpine-3.4
• node:6.1-alpine-3

etc.

[LaurentGoderre]

@Starefossen we can have as many tags as we want. I would rather have the one we support be unversioned and having the "experimental" versioned if we go that way.

[chorrell]

If we version the alpine variant, I think we'd want to pin to major only:

• node:alpine-3
• node:alpine-4
• etc

@LaurentGoderre How would the separate branch and tags work with the Docker Hub? If we want to pursue something like that it might be better toast create a new docker-node image, like docker-node-alpha.

As an aside, I think creating a separate official image for production and multi-build would be interesting. That is, a very minimal image (more so than slim) with just node installed. It would be an interesting way to do a kind of clean slate without breaking usage of the current image ( docker pull node-minimal or something like that)

Getting back to the request of the OP, maybe for the alpine variants we need to reconsider updating it when each image release gets updated rather than just doing it for Node v8.x.x. It's been out long enough that it might be time to reconsider how we want to approach it.

[LaurentGoderre]

@chorrell I am under the impression that you can specify rules using branch to create alternate tags. If we created an interim branch for alpine 3.5, we could potentially only trigger a build for the alpines variants and create distinct tags for these automated builds. Maybe it would be interesting to experiment with this on a fork to see if it's viable? THis model would allow us to manage the transition of base images.

[chorrell]

Oh interesting, I wasn't aware of that. Yeah, that seems work looking into.

[yosifkit]

At this point you should wait for the pending alpine 3.6 release coming this month.

[LaurentGoderre]

@yosifkit we have followed that logic for a while but it's stifling us. I would rather we work on transitions than always waiting for the next thing.

[yosifkit]

I was just mentioning that if you are going to add a variant for alpine 3.5 right now, then it would make more sense to wait a couple weeks for alpine 3.6. They seem to be on a 4-7 month release cycle (Nov-Jan and May-June), and they support each release normally for 2 years.

[hairyhenderson]

FYI - alpine 3.6 is out now...

[SimenB]

node@8 PR for upgrade to 3.6: #413

[Starefossen]

Superseded by Alpine 3.6 and #413.