In general, these are the guidelines we consider when deciding what to pre-install:
- Tools and ecosystems that are broadly popular and widely-used will be given priority.
- Recent versions of tools will be given priority over older versions.
- Tools and versions that are deprecated or have reached end-of-life will not be added.
- If a tool can be installed during the build, we will evaluate how much time is saved
and how much space is used by having the tool pre-installed.
- MIT, Apache, and GNU licenses are ok, anything else we'll have to check with lawyers.
- If a tool takes much space we will evaluate space usage and provide a decision if this tool can be pre-installed.
- If a tool requires the support of more than one version, we will consider the cost of this maintenance, how often new versions bring dangerous updates.
**Note:** For new tools, please, create an issue and get an approval from us to add this tool to the image before creating the pull request.
## Software and images support policy
These are the guidelines we follow in software and images supporting routine:
- Tools and versions will typically be removed 6 months after they are deprecated or have reached end-of-life.
- The images generally contain the latest versions of packages installed except for Ubuntu LTS where we rely on the Canonical-provided repositories mostly.
| Docker images | not more than 3 latest LTS OS\tool versions. New images or new versions of current images are added using the standard tool request process |
| Xcode | - all OS compatible versions side-by-side <br/> - for beta, GM versions - latest beta only <br/> - old patch versions are deprecated in 3 months |
In general, once a new version is installed on the image, we announce the default version update 2 weeks prior to deploying it to give time to adapt to upcoming changes. For potentially dangerous updates, we can extend the timeline up to 1 month between the announcement and deployment.
