How to reduce maintenance for dockerhub official images?

Hi,

I’ve added an official dockerhub image for xwiki at https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/blob/master/library/xwiki. This is all working nicely and the official image is available at https://hub.docker.com/_/xwiki/

However I have a maintenance problem. At the moment we have 3 branches (master, 8.x and 9.x) but I’m planning to add a lot more for “lts”, “stable”, “alpine” + tags for fixed versions of XWiki. In total it’s likely there’ll be something like 20 branches/tags at least.

The issue is that when I fix a bug in a Dockerfile for a branch or simply when I bring an improvement or improve the documentation, I need to backport it to all other branches and even delete and recreate the tags. That’s hugely time consuming and error-prone (it’s easy to forget one branch/tag).

So I’m wondering how other official library maintainers handle this.

Any idea?

Thanks a lot
-Vincent
XWiki official image maintainer

One idea is to:

  • Have template files (Dockerfile.template, docker-compose.yml.template, etc)
  • Have a build that generates the variants in subdirectories on master.
  • Manually execute that build regularl (or through a CI) and commit the result
  • Also generate the docker-library file that contains the SHA1 and send a PR when it changes

Any other idea? Is that how people do it?

Thanks
-Vincent