CentOS vs stability: req a Fedora / RHEL perspective
Tony Nelson
tonynelson at georgeanelson.com
Fri May 25 02:00:57 UTC 2007
At 2:33 PM -0500 5/24/07, Les Mikesell wrote:
>Tony Nelson wrote:
>> I'm setting up a server with CentOS (well, a test server (a Qemu VM), a
>> main server, and a backup server (both Xen slices)), one each with CentOS
>> 4.4, 4.5, and 5.0, and it all works. It's also one more version of CentOS
>> than I was expecting, as the test server got suddenly upgraded to CentOS
>> 4.5 during a 200 MB update. I then found the FAQ that explained that
>> CentOS does this a few times a year, and that the old point releases are
>> archives that won't receive any more updates; that is, to get security
>> updates one has to accept all the updates and version upgrades. This isn't
>> quite what I expected for a "stable" OS; rather it's more like Fedora (6),
>> which also just got a large update.
>
>Fedora gives you all the updates, all the time. RHEL/Centos give you
>security updates as soon as possible, batching the less critical
>bugfixes into point releases and rarely including updates that modify
>intended behavior.
OK.
>> Does RHEL work this way also? Or does RH provide security updates for,
>> e.g., RHEL 4.4 now that 4.5 is out?
>
>I think there is some difference in the repository handling but it's
>basically the same if you want to stay up to date. That is you can't
>get the security-only parts of 4.5 or beyond without taking the
>bugfixes, but you do have the choice to update only certain programs.
That choice would be mostly by hand yum-updating, right? Do a yum update,
sa "no", pick the parts I want and yum update package1 package2?
>> Am I just missing something? I'm new to setting up and maintaining servers.
>
>The 4.5 updates were unusual if not shocking in including changes that
>affect device naming and interface selection order in some machines.
>Makes me feel better about being too lazy to update a lot of machines
>still happily runing 3.8 with no problems... When I can figure out how
>to make Sun java work with tomcat, etc., I'll jump all the up to a 5.x
>version. My theory has always been that Linux kernels become stable
>somewhere around the X.X.20 release... (At least when there was an
>odd-numbered unstable version for development - maybe 2.6 will never
>stabilize).
OK. The 4.5 update was the first one I experienced. I have been thinking
that there might be some advantage to using the trailing edge for this
project, as you do, but I can probably deal with the changes.
--
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:' <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
More information about the fedora-list
mailing list