Update Docker.io group SRU exception

[Athos Ribeiro]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2025 at 10:22:05PM +0100, Robie Basak wrote:
>Hi Athos,

Hi Robie!

>On Fri, Apr 25, 2025 at 03:18:14PM -0300, Athos Ribeiro wrote:
>> I'd like to request a minor change in the Docker.io group SRU exception
>> [1].
>
>Thank you for proposing this. I agree that going to an minor or a patch
>upstream release over a major version bump is generally fine -
>especially when you're concerned about disruptive changes.
>
>Currently, users upgrading to a new release never face a feature
>regression, and only face a bugfix regression in some limited
>circumstances[1]. Could you adjust the process and wording to maintain
>this property, please?

This is not my understanding of this exception. We do have a section in
the end of the exception text where we document all the known
regressions
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DockerUpdates#Record_of_regressions).

Moreover, the introduction text says

   we provide more value to our users by delivering an "upstream"
   experience rather than worrying over-much about backward compatibility
   or regressions.

When I discussed this with the previous maintainer (Kanashiro), before I
started working on this stack, he did point out that the idea here would
be to continuously update the stack to the latest upstream version.

Thinking about your statement above, moving to the latest upstream
version would not be possible at all times given these projects do break
backwards compatibility now and then (as it's been proved by our
regressions section in the exception text), I went all the way back to
the first version of the exception
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DockerUpdates?action=recall&rev=1) from 2016,
and it seems to imply the same idea on continuously backporting the
latest upstream versions without mentions on how to act upon
regressions. Unfortunatelly, I could not find any discussions on this
exception from back then.

TBH, I do not see how we could maintain the current exception for the
whole lifecycle of an LTS release without eventually breaking some level
of backwards compatibility, unless we halt the upgrades at some point,
which would probably hinder the purpose of this exception.

Thoughts?

-- 
Athos Ribeiro
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