Better docker tags

[robertvazan]

Please use docker tags for versioning. It allows us to safely upgrade and downgrade to resolve version-specific issues and to identify the version that introduced the issue. Tagging with Ollama/llama.cpp/vLLM versions allows us to predict what we will get after an upgrade.

For example, image intelanalytics/ipex-llm-inference-cpp-xpu has 4 months old tag 2.1.0 and then only rolling tags latest and 2.2.0-SNAPSHOT. I have pulled latest about two months ago. If I pull now and find the new version broken, I will have no way to undo the upgrade. I can tag locally before upgrade as a workaround, but that will not help me when moving to a new computer. I cannot search the tag list on Docker Hub for hash of my image to identify my version. I don't even know whether it makes sense to upgrade, because there is no information about which tag contains what software.

Please add:

• unchanging version tags at least once per month (e.g. 20241229 or 2.1.1)
• alias for the last unchanging tag, either repurpose latest (with nightly for rolling tag) or add new stable tag
• tags identifying upgrades of Ollama/llama.cpp/vLLM (e.g. ollama-0.5.4)

[liu-shaojun]

Thank you for your feedback! We understand the importance of versioned tags for safe upgrades and troubleshooting.

Currently, for vLLM, the intelanalytics/ipex-llm-serving-xpu Docker image is consistently updated with versioned tags, ranging from 2.2.0-b1 to 2.2.0-b11, ensuring incremental improvements and fixes. However, we acknowledge that Ollama/llama.cpp does not yet support stable version tags.

We plan to address this in the future by releasing stable tags for significant changes in Ollama/llama.cpp, providing better clarity and usability.

To meet your immediate needs, we can provide a 2.2.0b20250101 tag as an interim solution. Please let us know if this works for you, and feel free to share any additional suggestions!