T̶a̶g̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶ ̶r̶e̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ Add more frequent rc pre-releases

[StephenRadachy]

The only way to use the latest alpine build is to run off of latest - I'd like to be able to pin a stable release :)

[liclac]

I agree, the reason it hasn't been done yet is because #110 was just merged and the sheer amount of code it changed warrants some caution… ^^;;

(797bc41, #349 and #355 are directly because of it, we don't want stuff like that slipping into a tagged release…)

[StephenRadachy]

👍 100% on board. What if in addition to releases, we had more frequent pre-releases which would be postfixed with '-rc-0,1,2,etc'. This way, those of us who like to live dangerously can without the uncertainty of a new docker pull breaking something without our knowledge.

[ragnarlonn]

I think time-based releases are better than feature-based. It feels like the modern way to do things, and a) motivates the developers to keep things release-ready at all times and b) ensures regular releases to the public. Maybe using "rc" releases whenever something feels not quite stable or tested enough is a good compromise that both gets these benefits while also making it easy for less adventurous people to identify the stable releases.

[robingustafsson]

On a related note, I think we should stop pushing master as the latest tag for Docker image builds. We promote docker pull loadimpact/k6 as one of the recommended ways to install k6, but on several occasions now the code on master has not been ready for prime time. How about we instead reserve the latest tag to be the equivalent of the latest stable/tagged version and then build a master or unstable branch for master builds?

[liclac]

Sure, makes sense. Could someone PR an amendment to the CircleCI script to make that happen?

[liclac]

I'm personally not a fan of time-based releases because it adds more work for the maintainers (eg. me)

[na--]

Closing this, because:

• we've switched to time-based releases, we release a new k6 version roughly every 8 weeks
• the official docker latest tag tracks the latest stable (or hotfix) k6 release, while the Docker master image is built from every k6 git commit in the master branch
• while we don't have public RC versions, we try to keep master quite stable and bug-free