Can we have all perl versions on the latest ubuntu (or whatever)?

[briandfoy]

In #161, I changed to using some of the legacy images to get perl versions to use in GitHub workflows. We all knew that was a temporary solution but it worked for awhile. I don't think that's working anymore because these older images are no supported in GitHub Actions. Buster images are now a hard fail when it encounters apt, while Bullseye still works but is unsupported. I'd really like to have all maintenance perl versions available for testing.

I see that the repo is only building the supported versions of perl.

I realize that building all of these take a ton of time, but if we want to do it, we can probably figure it out.

[zakame]

Hi @briandfoy, thanks for the report! 🙇

As mentioned in #187 (comment), we can only build currently supported Perl versions at a given time - building maintenance versions beyond these are well out of scope of what the Docker Library can support (also do note that this restriction also applies to the base Debian images, currently Buster/Bullseye are supported.) We could explore publishing alternative image builds of all Perl versions to a different registry such as GHCR, cf #95, as well as doing the actual image builds in our own infra outside of Docker Library build infra,) though this comes at a cost of increasing maintenance over time as more Perl versions get added.

Just to give an idea of the scale of builds needed, currently we build 32 images for the 3 supported versions (+ 1 devel version) on every PR. Adding a version gets us another 4-6 images (at minimum) to build, so if we're to build images all the way down to 5.10 mean we'd need at least 88 to 116 images built every time, and that number will increase for every new Perl version and base image permutation.

[briandfoy]

Heh, I started this issue about a week ago and just left it unsubmitted for a bit so #187 came after I typed out everything. If the answer is that Docker Library only accepts what the project currently supports (not end-of-life), then that policy answer is what it is.

Beyond that, what do you need help with if you wanted to do this? And if you don't, that's fine too, but I'd rather work in existing projects instead of new ones.

[briandfoy]

So, I think I have my answer after looking through all the Docker Library stuff. I didn't realize that they rebuild all the images in their own Jenkins setup, so that limitations exist makes much more sense for me.

Aside from that, this is the sort of thing I'd like to help with. I'm playing around in perlreview/perl_docker_images, but I'm barely not-a-beginner with all of this. I'm willing to do boring grunt work in other projects though.