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Docker Deprecation Policy
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PR Branch: https://github.com/duglin/docker/tree/Deprecate | |
Right now Docker's development is a bit constrained by the requirement to be backwards compatible. | |
Normally minor releases (e.g. 1.2 -> 1.3) are required to be backwards compatible, and that makes | |
a lot of sense for stable products that have a regular major release update schedule. | |
However, Docker is still (relatively) new and as such some of the original design decisions are | |
no longer correct, but we are forced to support them for, what feels like, forever. In addition, | |
there are cases where we decline to offer a better alternative because we would then feel | |
compelled to support both forever - and usually having more than one way to do something is bad. | |
We have claimed to deprecate certian features in the past but it seems rare that we actually | |
follow through and remove support for them. | |
This PR attempts to formalize Docker's deprecation policy by doing a few things: | |
1 - makes it clear to our users what to expect with respect to backwards compatibility | |
2 - gives us the freedom to removed deprecated features w/o having to wait for a major release, | |
which has yet to happen (aside from v1.0) | |
There are several steps to this PR: | |
1 - decide if we want to even allow minor release removal of features at all | |
2 - if so, then decide what the proper timeframe is for keeping deprecrated features. | |
This PR offers up a proposal of *2* minor releases. | |
3 - pick a feature to use as a guinea pig. For now this PR has picked on `docker inspect <image>` | |
just to show what the documention would look like. If we make it to step 3 in this process | |
I suspect we may pick another feature. But we can decide that later. |
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