Nomad upgrade strategy with regards to backported bug fixes

Nomad
1

I am aware of the upgrade guide at Upgrading | Nomad | HashiCorp Developer and the recommendation to upgrade one minor version at a time.

We are currently at 1.5.5 and I am upgrading one release at a time. So one after the other to 1.5.9 and then to 1.6.0, 1.6.1 and 1.6.2.

The challenge however, is that some things that were fixed in 1.6.2 were backported to 1.5.9, and if I go from 1.5.9 to 1.6.0 before going to 1.6.2, I loose those bugfixes for 2 minor releases.

That might be fine in most cases, but what if the jobs rely on a bugfix and upgrading to the next major causes that bug to reappear until we continue upgrading to the latest minor?

I reckon I need to go from the latest 1.5.x to the latest 1.6.x instead, but this is missing from the docs, and I am not sure this is guaranteed to work.

2

Hi @skoppe,

The document is slightly misleading and I will get this fixed up. If I reword it as shown below, does that make the upgrade guide a little clearer?

Nomad strives to be backward compatible for at least 1 point release, so Nomad v1.6.X hosts work with v1.5.X hosts. Upgrading 2 point releases (eg v1.4.0 to v1.6.0) may work but is untested and unsupported.

To clarify, you don’t need to upgrade to each patch release such as 1.6.0, 1.6.1 and 1.6.2. You can go from 1.5.X to 1.6.{latest}.

Thanks,
jrasell and the Nomad team

3

Thank you @jrasell ! That clears it up.

I mistook a point release to mean the same as a patch release.

Wikipedia seems to agree with me Patch release - Wikipedia, however, I found other resources that claimed a point release is any non-major one. :person_shrugging:

If I reword it as shown below, does that make the upgrade guide a little clearer?

Yes, that would have clarified it for me.

Thanks, Sebastiaan.