[K12OSN] Heads up: CentOS 5.1 released
Nils Breunese
nils at breun.nl
Tue Dec 4 16:45:16 UTC 2007
Mel Wade wrote:
> Just wondering why they don't update to the latest releases of
> Firefox and OpenOffice when they do these releases? That would give
> us more reason to upgrade...
Distributions - especially the ones labelling themselves 'enterprise'
- generally don't do major version upgrades because of stability and
ease of upgrading for users, as there is no need to migrate
configuration settings etc.
They usually only backport security fixes from new versions to the
version they're shipping in the supported distribution releases. If
they would just package every upstream release, RHEL (and thus CentOS)
would probably be a whole lot less stable. This Red Hat article
explains this pretty well: http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting/
Of course you could always go Gentoo or compile everything yourself,
but I really wouldn't try that in a school or business setting. I set
up a K12LTSP 5EL server and it is rock solid. It is pretty comforting
to know that I can theoretically leave this server running the same
setup for the next 7 years if I wanted too. Yum will keep the current
versions patched and I'll never have to worry about changing config
files or other glitches that come from moving to newer versions of
software.
Fedora is of course moving a lot faster that RHEL/CentOS, but CentOS
lets me sleep at night and I value that very much. :o)
Nils Breunese.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/k12osn/attachments/20071204/242c21eb/attachment.sig>
More information about the K12OSN
mailing list