Ubuntu Wiki

This document describes the policy for updating the docker.io group of packages (docker.io-app, containerd-app, runc, docker-buildx, docker-compose-v2) in a stable supported distro, in particular LTS releases.

Basically docker is a sufficiently fast-moving project that we provide more value to our users by delivering an "upstream" experience rather than worrying over-much about backward compatibility or regressions.

Process

The aim is to backport stable and compatible releases across all the packages that are part of this stack (runc/containerd-app/docker.io-app/docker-buildx/docker-compose-v2) to all supported releases.

To do this we will:

1. File (or find, our users are quite proactive about wanting this) a bug to cover the upgrade.
2. Upload the latest upstream version of the packages to the current development series of Ubuntu. Make sure all the versions are compatible among them.
3. Once they have migrated, they can then be uploaded with minimal necessary changes to the SRU queue of the supported Ubuntu releases. For docker.io-app, docker-buildx and docker-compose-v2, .0 releases will not be backported; for containerd-app and runc, .0 releases are eligible for backporting.

We will reuse the upgrade bug for the SRU but this does not include detailed test case or regression potential sections (it should link to this page for the sake of the SRU team member doing the review!).

QA

As hinted above, we will not do amazingly extensive QA. The package has a basic autopkgtest which catches gross breakages and in practice has caught most packaging issues so far (the only problem I am aware of it missing is a problem in containerd on arm64 because we did not run autopkgtests on arm64 at the time).

There is also an autopkgtest that exercises "docker in lxd" as described in https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/04/13/stephane-graber-lxd-2-0-docker-in-lxd-712/ . on autopkgtests.

This QA should happen both for the -proposed -> -release migration in the devel series and again as part of the SRU verification.

Record of regressions

According to LP: #1939106, upstream removed support for the aufs storage driver. This broke users in August 2021, but this breakage was explicitly permitted by this policy as it was written at the time. The deprecation notice was stated in Docker Engine 18.09 see https://docs.docker.com/engine/release-notes/18.09/#deprecation-notices (2019-09-03).

In LP: #1968035, upstream has changed the requirements to run the new buildsystem DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build .. In the new version, the new buildsystem requires docker-buildx which was not included in the SRU.