Edge Agent base image upgrade

Hey all!

Debian 9 “Stretch” is the base kernel used for the edge agent container. It will officially exit LTS in 1 year (June 2022). I’m requesting an upgrade of the kernel version to Buster.

My specific use case would appreciate this primarily due to the factory version of Python available through apt with Stretch is 3.5 which is EOL. So I’m building Python 3.9 from source with a custom Dockerfile. It’s fine…but would certainly appreciate the speed gains from pulling the package from apt instead of building from source on every container image build.

Happy to answer any questions!

Thanks @Frederick_Loucks. We plan on making that switch this fall, when Node.js 16 goes to LTS. (Currently Node 14 is LTS.)

Perfect, thanks Dylan, makes sense to me. No issues with that timeline as far as I’m concerned.

@Dylan_Schuster on this note, are there any Losant dependencies on Python 2/3 on the edge agent?
I’m using an altinstall during my build so I don’t overwrite the main “python” alias. But that’s a bit of a pain on my side (explicitly calling “python 3.9 script.py” is more maint than I care for). If you guys have no Python deps I’ll just overwrite it.

I’m told that no, there are no Python dependencies in the edge agent.

Thanks for the confirmation! I’ll mark the thread as resolved.