In general, we like being able to support and ship container images for new OSes quickly, even same-day. That's straightforward for Debian and Ubuntu, for example, because they offer tags in their container repos for new versions while in pre-release. The Alpine DH repo doesn't do that, requiring users to use the edge tag. It would be useful if this repo exposed test images for the edge tag so that we could provide pre-release testing for new Alpine versions, likely only in runtime.

This requires three work items:

• Add alpine:edge to our container mirror
• Add a Dockerfile for edge
• Add this flavor in runtime "extra platforms"

The intent is that this approach will enable us to offer same-day support for new Alpine releases and publish container images at the same time or soon after. We've had customer complaints when we haven't had that, sometimes due to CVE patches being available only in the new Alpine version (which we did not support).

We have a Debian 13 (pre-release) image in (produce from) this repo and it is used as a test leg in many other repos (in main). It is a good analog of what is being proposed. We would use edge more sparingly since it resets from RC to Alpha every 6 months. we could comment out the reference if the lower-quality builds produce too many regressions.

Using .NET 10 as an example, we would/could do the following, in main:

• Add an extra platforms entry for edge now
• When Alpine 3.22 ships, update 3.21 references -> 3.22 and comment out the edge entry. This is expected to happen before (the RC1 snap.
• Uncomment out the edge entry (again in main) as we get closer in ~ October (expecting a November/December Alpine 3.23 ship date).
• Repeat
• Consider leaving edge in place as long as it doesn't cause undesirable regressions (but remove/comment before the RC1 snap for the following .NET version). The intent is to avoid edge in servicing. It may be fine in main.

@mthalman @jkotas