[K12OSN] Heads up: CentOS 5.1 released

[Nils Breunese]

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.
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