Contract of "stack" is unclear

[buildpacks]

Contract of "stack" is unclear

[sclevine]

The concept of a "stack" is defined here: https://github.com/buildpack/spec/blob/master/platform.md#stacks

A stack is a combination of a build-time base image and a runtime base image. We can't just use the tag names of those though, because they may live in different registries (including private registries), and it's important that the run image live in the registry that you're publishing to.

[nebhale]

Spec aside, do we have more humane documentation about what stacks are, scheduled in the backlog somewhere?

[ekcasey]

@nebhale we recently scheduled work on the buildpack/pack README. I think that should help. If we explain the pack *-stack commands and the -s flag for pack create-builder it should be more obvious what a stack is and how it is used.

[nebhale]

Sounds good.

[dsyer]

We can't just use the tag names of those though, because they may live in different registries (including private registries), and it's important that the run image live in the registry that you're publishing to.

That information is really important. Please include it in some humane documentation, along with some examples of how to actually discover/define the image labels for a given stack.

[sclevine]

We definitely plan to have detailed, plain-english documentation for the pack CLI ready before we cut the first beta.

As @ekcasey mentions, the stack image tags are stored/manipulated with the pack *-stack commands. This will be covered in the documentation for those commands.

[jromero]

@dsyer @nebhale we recently added additional human readable documentation around stacks.

https://buildpacks.io/docs/using-pack/stacks/

Does that satisfy this issue or do we feel more is necessary?

Feedback would be appreciated.

[jromero]

Closing due to staleness and provided documentation mentioned above.