[Docker-maint] Plans to update the docker package

[Arnaud]

Dear Docker Packaging Team,

I'm working at Collabora, and right now I have a bit of time to dedicate
to the Docker Debian package. I would like to bump Docker to the latest
version in Debian unstable.

Up to now I've been struggling a bit to get the big picture, and I think
I'm getting there.

>From what I understood from the latest `vendor.conf` file, Docker now
uses runc and containerd from upstream. Moreover, I cooked a little
script to compare the vendored libraries with their upstream version,
and amazingly it looks like Docker doesn't patch any of its vendored
libraries at the moment. Same goes with containerd.

It seems that it was not so simple in the past, and that's why there is
now a 'docker-runc' and a 'docker-containerd' package. But in this mail
I won't talk about these packages, I'm interested in the 'runc' and
'containerd' packages which track the upstream repositories, not the
docker forks.

So what I want to do in a first step is to bump the 'runc' and
'containerd' package to the latest version. It seems that the 'runc'
package is already up-to-date (1.0.0-rc4). However the 'containerd'
package is still at '0.2.3', while upstream is at '1.0.2-rc1'.

I looked at the situation, and there's a bit of work involved: a little
less than 20 packages need to be created or bumped to a newer version. I
already created 4 packages that I submitted through ITP and that are now
available on salsa.debian.org.

So in the following days and weeks, I will hopefully dedicate some time
to package containerd dependencies, until I manage to get containerd
itself packaged and up to date. Then I will attempt the same with the
docker package. At least, that's the plan :)

Tell me if I miss anything !

Additionally, I noticed that since mid-2017, Docker changed the way it
manages its codebase. There's now 3 repo:

- https://github.com/moby/moby for the engine
- https://github.com/docker/cli for the client
- https://github.com/docker/docker-ce which is a kind of
"meta-repository" that contains both repositories above, plus packaging
files.

The tricky thing is that the engine and the client don't get tagged
anymore, only docker-ce has tags and releases.

I don't know if some of you already dived into this. It seems to me that
it could be easier to have two packages: docker-engine that would track
moby/moby, and docker-cli that would track docker/cli. Then a
metapackage 'docker' that would depend on both, and ensure the versions
match.

On the other hand I'm quite new at Debian packaging, so I wouldn't trust
myself :)

What's your thoughts on that ? Any comment is welcome.

Best regards,

  Arnaud