Tags on Docker Hub not very useful - would help a lot to add date-based tags

[fghalasz]

The tags on the Medley docker images on Docker Hub are not very useful (they are the shortref to the corresponding github commit). In particular, they contain no date information and DockerHub is terrible at showing you the dates of images (e.g., using "last month" for anything created more than 30 days and less than 60 days ago).

Our dockerhub repo would be a lot easier to use if we included a date in the tags. Probably would make most sense to do a combo tag with date and short-ref since there are cases where you might indeed want to correlate the image with the github commit. The date should come first in any combined tag to allow easy sorting by date.

Could also multi-tag each image with the date and well as the short-ref.

[masinter]

The docker/releases process might be a little backward. We should build the releases first (and figure out what other release targets we need). Releases have names that default to medley- or maiko- followed by the date in YYMMDD.
Releases have targets, one of wich is "Docker", one is "GitHub User" and possibly Native Mac.

Docker releases should contain the release names of the medley and maiko's they contain.

[stumbo]

I agree dropping the shortref makes sense.

The latest version of the Build Docker image github action tags images with the Medley release name medley-211023.

It is probably worth adding another tag that is just medley which represents that latest version of Medley. In essence this would be the same as latest.

I currently do not label releases with the Maiko release build name. If multiple Medley releases are built off the same Maiko release and you pull a Docker image using the Maiko release tag you will get the latest Medley build. Will this behavior meet expectations?

I have the Build Docker image action set up to only label images latest if they use the standard Medley release naming pattern, medley-YYMMDD. If we agree this is the correct behavior, I will make using the medley or maiko-YYMMDD tags contingent on the Medley release tag format. This would allow us to create one off releases that require explicitly naming to pull and use.

With the above in place, does it still add value having a date tag associated with each image? Too many tags for the same Docker image is just going to cause confusion.

[masinter]

I just tried it and it seemed to work well, not take too long to build. I did the medley release first, no changes since the last maiko release.

Is there an option to mark the release as "pre-Release"? I was imagining a manual step to get the WhatChanged messages. I'm not sure why that gives me changes since a v3.52 number I made up a long time ago.

[fghalasz]

I don't think a date tag is needed given the date-based Medley release tags.

[masinter]

I don't see an issue left here.