What are the stable tags for 5.x images?

[yurishkuro]

I noticed that the tag 5.0.4 seems to be moving between images with different hashes (e.g. this auto-created PR https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger/pull/7069/files). This is very counterintuitive, I was expecting major.minor.patch version to point to an immutable build.

• what is the motivation for overriding the same tag with different images?
• is there a trully stable tag for 5.x releases?

[tianon]

See docker-library/official-images#12277 (comment) for a long-form explanation, but the short version is that if you want something immutable, you need to use a content-addressable digest reference (immutability is what they're designed for / why they're supported by the protocol, in fact).

So with that in mind, I'm not actually sure what you mean by "trully stable tag for 5.x releases" -- the cassandra:5 tag will point to the latest 5.x build we have, on the latest base OS we support, with the latest rebuilds/updates supported.

If you mean "tag that won't ever change", that's not something any images in this program (Docker Official Images) has, because that's counter to the purpose of the program (and as noted above, pull-by-digest already provides this in a clean way, so it would be pointless for us to also do so).

[yurishkuro]

Fair enough, but still what's the point updating 5.0.4 with different hashes? If it's a new release, why not bump the version? If it's not a new release, what's changing in the image? Are there release notes somewhere explaining the difference between hashes?

[tianon]

The "5.0.4" in our tag refers to Cassandra's 5.0.4 upstream release, not the image version. Usually, if that tag gets pushed again, it's because the underlying OS has updates (which are almost always security related).