[shykes]

Note that the image maintainers (starting with tianon above) reserve the right to change the base distro they use for the images. So they can truly use the best tool for the job, now and in the future.

[prudhvis]

Changing the distro underneath would break all other Dockerfiles that assume they are running on a certain distro. How do we have to deal with cases when the distro is switched from debian to centos for example?.

[IanCal]

If you don't want things to get broken further down the line, you should use tags. It's the same with any dependency.