Base Ubuntu version changing

[wyardley]

I know cimg/base normally tracks relatively recent stuff on some kind of predictable cadence. That said, is there a way to get a newer node tag (e.g., 14.21) but with the older Ubuntu version, via another tag (I didn't see one available)?

I realize it may not be possible, but IMO, it would be nice if these versions could stay predictable within a set of versions (i.e., when going from 14.20 to 14.21), or at least be accessed via a tag like 14.21-buster.

(issue prompting me to open this: when I bumped our default tag from 14.20 to 14.21, we no longer had OpenSSL 1.1 available from the bump to jammy, which meant some stuff broke in our builds that I had to resolve with a kind of ugly hack).

[JalexChen]

Hey @wyardley, Just to confirm, what you're trying to say is you would like to have a new node version e.g 14.21, but use an older ubuntu version (20.04) vs what the default base image has (22.04)?

If so, I think this is a good idea, and I think @felicianotech would agree, especially when there are breaking changes introduced or in the case of our base image changing from 20.04 to 22.04 in October.

The ability to do this already exists. However, it has not been implemented directly. For example, in cimg-base, there are directories for 18.04, 20.04, and 22.04.

So for your use-case, FROM cimg/base:2022.11-20.04 would be what you're looking for.

This is an example for Ruby to address OpenSSL compatibility. 2.7 vs 3.1

I'm going to put this in the backlog as a future task to work on

[wyardley]

Yes, confirming that’s what I’d like!
Also if there were a way to bake in an OpenSSL v1 compatibility layer into the base image that has 22.x, that would make my more specific issue a lot less of an issue (could file a separate issue for that if it’s something you’d consider)