The patch system that we have in place is for the very scenario, to fix an image that shipped broken. We ship new releases when software is simply being updated.
The workaround we suggested to users (using apt-get instead of apt) who reported and experienced this problem didn’t cause the image to break once we fixed the problem. We can’t predict users doing something outside of what we suggest.
While I understand what happened for you @ggreer, I’d ask that you also understand we had support tickets with users asking for us to fix this problem the way did, with pushing this patch. They would have been upset if we forced them to use another tag for the image instead of just fixing it. We’re doing our best to please as many people as we can.
Lastly, I do want to share that the responsibility for the Linux machine image is moving to another team at CircleCI as we speak. What we’re hoping to deliver with this change is more TLC for the Linux machine image. We’re looking to deliver more frequent, scheduled updates, improved community on changes (including ahead of time communication), faster updating Docs when this images changes, etc.
I’ll make sure to discuss with the new team our existing patch process as it is today, and see if there’s a way we can improve it. Our team also works on the Convenience Images (Docker) and if you’ve heard anything about the next-gen images, we specially don’t touch existing image tags as a default practice. Perhaps we do the same here. Stay tuned to this Announcements category and the CircleCI Discuss Images category for future information on this.
– Ricardo
