ORAS v1.2.0 milestone discussion

[FeynmanZhou]

ORAS is following a quarter-based release cadence in 2023. ORAS v1.1.0 was released on Sep 5. It's time to determine the v1.2.0 release plan and kick off the work for v1.2.0 in the community. After triaging all issues, I grouped the major enhancements into five aspects as follows. Some enhancements are suggested as critical and some are nice to have.

Based on the quarterly release cycle, the release date could be set to the middle of December.

This is an open discussion and I am also open to any suggestions. Feel free to share anything feature requests you think are missing below or should be prioritized.

Major enhancements

Standardize the CLI output for scripting experience and improve output experience

Provide a progress bar to improve the usability of content transportation. Standardize the CLI output for scripting experience.

• Show progress bar when downloading or pushing content from/to a registry #893
• Add progress output to oras copy #940
• Oras commands like attach, discover, and pull support an option to format output as JSON #638

Improve verbose logs for all ORAS commands to enhance the troubleshooting experience

Make the verbose logs consistent, useful, concise, and human-readable. Users can easily locate the root cause by analyzing the verbose logs. Formulize the CLI output guideline to provide a unified reference for future command output.

• Add verbose http logging to blob fetch #911
• Improve verbose logging for oras commands #1091
• Incomplete output when copying #916

This issue #1053 relies on oras-project/oras-go#576

Simplify image lifecycle metadata management experience through annotations

Users can easily update the image lifecycle metadata without learning the OCI Spec. Annotating experience is critical to users who want to attach or add image lifecycle metadata. The annotating functionality is useful for software supply chain scenarios such as adding "End-of-support" metadata to an OCI image.

• append annotations instead of overwrite? #571

Optimize ORAS performance

Decrease the auth request time to optimize ORAS performance.

• Optimize the number of auth requests for oras cp #1105

This issue relies on oras-project/oras-go#594

Support multi-arch image index management (Nice to have)

Most of the open-source projects support multi-arch images. Enable users to push/attach a multi-arch image or an image index by leveraging the OCI image index.

• support --platform in oras push and oras attach #1066
• Support multi-arch image/artifact push #1053
• Add platform flag to attach command #813

Complement OCI layout management (Nice to have)

ORAS has a few deletion capabilities for some ORAS commands that are not supported in the OCI image layout. Complement OCI layout management enables users to better manage the OCI image layout.

• support OCI image layout target in oras blob delete #761
• support OCI image layout target in oras manifest delete #762

These two issues rely on oras-project/oras-go#454

Automate installation package manager (Winget, Snap) management (Nice to have)

• Automate the ORAS upgrade in package manager systems #1025

[FeynmanZhou]

We agreed to move #816 to milestone v1.2.0 based on the community meeting discussion on Sep 13, 2023.

[TerryHowe]

LGTM

[Amulyam24]

Hi! Is there an estimated time period for releasing 1.2.0?

[FeynmanZhou]

Hi @Amulyam24 ,

Based on the development process of the v1.2.0 milestone, the ETA release date will be around mid of Jan.
Do you have any additional requests on this release?

[Amulyam24]

Hi @FeynmanZhou. Thank you for the update!
I'm looking forward to ppc64le artefacts being released after the support has been added in #1118.

[FeynmanZhou]

Hi @Amulyam24 , ORAS v1.2.0-beta.1 released on Feb 8 and has the ppc64le release binary: https://github.com/oras-project/oras/releases/download/v1.2.0-beta.1/oras_1.2.0-beta.1_linux_ppc64le.tar.gz

[Amulyam24]

Thank you @FeynmanZhou !

[Amulyam24]

Hi @FeynmanZhou, what is the expected timeline for the release of 1.2.0?

[FeynmanZhou]

@Amulyam24 The stable release of ORAS v1.2.0 is planned to be released at the beginning of Apr.

[q2go]

Any news regarding v1.2.0? It's middle of April already. Are there any unresolved problems in v1.2.0-beta.1 which might even require another beta release?