Add tag for `lts` releases

[bluesmoon]

Hi folks,

Would it be possible to add a shared tag for lts releases of Julia? This would always map to the latest LTS release, which should be 1.10.5 (or 1.10) at the time of this writing.

In our workflow we only use LTS releases, so it would help to have our CI pull from julia:lts rather than having to figure out if julia:latest is LTS or not.

Thank you.

[tianon]

I thought for sure we had discussed this somewhere before but now I cannot find it! I'm hesitant because we don't have a data source from upstream that tells us which release is LTS in an easily machine-readable way, but on the flip side, we also hand-maintain which release is "latest" so this is not unreasonable. 👍

[tianon]

Oh, we do not hand-maintain "latest", that's automatic based on which versions we currently have. Hmm.

[tianon]

I wonder if we could convince upstream folks to add an lts boolean to https://julialang.org/downloads/#json_release_feed 👀 ❤️

[bluesmoon]

I'll post on the Julia slack and ask if this is possible. Is latest is always the latest built? i.e., if 1.10.6 is built after 1.11.0 then does 1.10.6 becomes latest?

[tianon]

No, "latest" will always point to the highest numeric GA release (so until there's a 1.12 or 2.0 that's GA, it will point to whatever the latest patch release of 1.11 is).

[fredrikekre]

I wonder if we could convince upstream folks to add an lts boolean to https://julialang.org/downloads/#json_release_feed 👀 ❤️

See JuliaLang/VersionsJSONUtil.jl#2. I don't think anyone would object, just nobody has implemented it.

[tianon]

Hmm, we could scrape the lts version from https://github.com/JuliaLang/www.julialang.org/blob/392c3ebde26ce60ae42501888dee7493a1860be7/config.md?plain=1#L19-L21 but that doesn't fill me with warm fuzzies (it doesn't appear to be an intentional "external" data source 😂).

[tianon]

(I'm looking at this again as I realize 1.11 is EOL, and really that we should only ever have one 1.x, at most one pre-release, and then one LTS)