So packaging Docker is not for the faint of heart, and maybe it's too much of a burden for one developer alone. In the end, it's quite difficult to find the right approach to package Docker, and it's easy to make mistakes that cost hours of works. After handling all these dependencies, there are other issues to tackle, some related to Go packaging itself, and others due to Docker release process and development workflow. Packaging Docker is a tedious work, mainly due to a very big dependency tree. Looking at the git history, there was not much happening.Īs for the reason for this sad state of things, I can only guess. This package was stuck at the version 1.13.1, released on Feb 8, 2017. There used to be a package there, but it had bugs that prevented it to migrate to Debian testing. What's even more sad is that for quite a while, looking into Debian unstable didn't look promising either. The current Debian doesn't provide any package for Docker. Debian stable), then you have no install candidate. That's 3 years old, but Debian Jessie is fairly old as well. This version was released on May 14, 2015. If you're running Debian 8 Jessie, you can install Docker 1.6.2, through backports. To better understand why this update of the docker.io package is such a good news, let's have quick look at the current Debian offer: rmadison -u debian docker.io This is for the short story, let me know give you some more details. We discussed the current status and issues, and then he basically did all the job, from updating the package to tackling all the long-time opened bugs.

This is where another Debian Developer, Dmitry Smirnov, jumped in. I could get some of this work uploaded to Debian, but ultimately I was a bit stuck on how to solve the circular dependencies that plague the Docker package. I joined the Debian Go Packaging Team and I started to work on the many, many Docker dependencies that needed to be updated in order to update the Docker package itself. I personally started to work on that early in 2018. Let me give you a very rough summary of how things came to be. Another interesting fact is that, version-wise, the package is moving from 1.13.1 from early 2017 to version 18.03 from March 2018: that's a one-year leap forward. The most striking fact about this change: it's the first time in two years that docker.io has migrated to 'testing'. This is good news for Debian users, as before that the package was more or less abandoned in 'unstable', and the future was uncertain. Quickly afterwards, the package moved to Debian Testing. Last week, a new version of docker.io, the Docker package provided by Debian, was uploaded to Debian Unstable.

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