This image should have a change log

[michaelklishin]

While the claim of significant breaking changes in this image (from #786) could not be further from the truth, it is true that this image does not have a change log of any kind.

It also does not really have any versioning independent from RabbitMQ releases, even though changes such as #780 #787 are not changes in RabbitMQ.

So maybe this image can adopt either a change log or a practice of posting announcements (via Discussions) about meaningful changes such as #780 #787.

If we adopt a change log, I guess we'd have to tweak release automation to update it every time Erlang, RabbitMQ or OpenSSL versions change. Most changes are just version bumps, so the overall usefullness of a change log will be fairly limited.

So I personally would choose the announcements option. Which has its own problem: no one reads those announcements before it's too late and a breaking change has already been shipped.

But in both cases those "dramatic breaking changes" would at least be documented.

@yosifkit @tianon @lukebakken WDYT?

[michaelklishin]

@tianon @yosifkit can we please add an Annoucement discussions category to this repo?

I'd like to post an announcement of the rabbitmqadmin v1 => rabbitmqadmin v2 migration in a visible way.

Team RabbitMQ uses announcements quite a bit in the RabbitMQ's own repo. Sometimes we have 2-3 pinned at a time for visibility.

[yosifkit]

That sounds like a great idea. I've created the category.

[michaelklishin]

The category does not show up for me when I try to start a new discussion. Let me investigate what could be missing.

[michaelklishin]

Ah, it can be as simple as: the Announcements category is limited to users with privileges above a certain level.

[michaelklishin]

@yosifkit can you please post this as an announcement? You should be able to edit my comment and copy the Markdown source below.

Feel free to edit the text as you see fit.

rabbitmqadmin v1 is being replaced with v2

What is Changing

If you do not rely on rabbitmqadmin, a CLI tool that ships with this image,
then the changes covered below do not affect you.

This image historically has included rabbitmqadmin v1, a CLI tool that targets the RabbitMQ HTTP API.

Team RabbitMQ has developed a replacement, rabbitmqadmin v2 (doc guide, GitHub repo). The new tool has a very similar CLI but there are some differences. See the doc guide to learn about the differences and what v2 has to offer.

Why are We Doing This?

rabbitmqadmin v1 forces a Python dependency on this image. This means that the image will be
flagged for having Python CVEs very often, which has become enough of a problem for Team RabbitMQ
to develop a standalone replacement and fundamentally avoid "external" CVEs that come from a dependency.

Using a standalone rabbitmqadmin v2 fundamentally addresses this problem by allowing us to
drop a number of dependencies that are common attack targets.

The Road to rabbitmqadmin v2

The migration to rabbitmqadmin v2 has begun in #780, #787.

At first, the Alpine Linux variant of this image did not have rabbitmqadmin at all, per discussion in #780.

Now that rabbitmqadmin v2 binary builds include an Alpine-compatible statically linked MUSL variant, it can be reintroduced to the Alpine version. This was done in #787.

New builds of this image should include rabbitmqadmin v2 in both Ubuntu and Alpine variants. In the meantime, please learn about the new major version in a dedicated doc guide on rabbitmq.com.

[yosifkit]

After reviewing the "maintainer" permissions of github, we decided to just bump you and @lukebakken so that you have access to create announcements.

[michaelklishin]

Thank you. A new announcement of the changes is now up #790.