fix version of installed package via apt-get

Question

I'm stuck on a strange question:

Should we fix version of installed package? Could it be possible that some major version became incompatible with my php code?

Exemple: I install theses packages on each build on my docker:

apt-get install git apt-get install zip apt-get install unzip apt-get install zlib1g-dev

could it be possible one day, that a new major major version happen and is not compatible with my application code executed by php-fpm?

Answer 1

First you listed packages like git , zip , etc. How do you intend them to become incompatible with your code?

Second, of course, the day will come that new compiler will warn on your code having deprecation stuff used. But that has nothing with docker . Docker is containerization technology, it doesn't care about keeping your code up-to-date.

If you are talking about upgrading of existing components after downloading docker image - that would probably worth doing.

In general approach could be following: in your development process you use latest (upgraded) images and tools for your master development branch, but as soon as you make releases, you tag them, and for them it could be useful to make a snapshot of all used tools , including docker images, to be able in future to reproduce them.

For example we use ubuntu:latest images for master branches and for released versions we use versioned images like ubuntu:19.04 , also making a backup of an image to be safe in case it will be removed from public registry.