[rhn-users] Stay on minor release

[Felipe Massia]

I think it's not feasible (financially?) to keep all minor versions up to
date, it would be a maintainer's nightmare. Also, most people won't need to
keep a system frozen at an exact minor release (except for the case I point
out below). I think that's why Red Hat supports major versions only. This
means that when a bug comes out, they need to fix only the latest versions
of a package (one per major version).

The problem is when a third party says "my product was validated to work
with RHEL 5.1" but they've already released 5.4. And now, should I keep my
system frozen at 5.1 or update it to 5.4+? Before continuing, let me quote
http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/:

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle is designed to reduce the level of
> change within each major release over time increasing predictability and
> decreasing maintenance costs.
>

and also:

During the entire Life Cycle, Red Hat makes commercially reasonable efforts
> to maintain binary compatibility for the core runtime environment across all
> minor releases and asynchronous errata (possible exceptions include critical
> security issues).
>

So Red Hat does not *guarantee* 5.4 will behave the exact same way as a 5.1.
Well, thinking about that, it's kind of impossible, isn't it? When they fix
a bug, the behaviour is inevitably changed. So there's a best effort to
minimize change, but they simply can't say there'll be no change at all.

Back to the third party product validation issue, I believe saying it works
for 5.1 is the same as saying it works for version 5, releases 1 and above.
Some companies may refuse to give support to a system where the minor
release is different. But isn't it obvious that an operating system must be
updated?

I guess minor releases are only a way to identify media releases (ISOs, CDs
and DVDs).

Also, a detail you may have missed: when you do "yum update" on a 5.3 you
don't go exactly to 5.4, you go somewhere between 5.4 and 5.5. The only
guaranteed way to go to a minor version (exactly) is installing from ISOs.
-- 
Felipe


On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 15:45, Seth Stone <sstone at pinecove.com> wrote:

>  I’ve noticed that with both up2date in RHEL 4 and yum in RHEL 5 my
> systems are automatically transitioned to the next minor release of the OS.
> For example, if I install 5.3 and run “yum update” I will be migrated to
> 5.4.  Is there any way to designate that you want to update only to the
> currently installed minor release?
>
>
>
> I’m trying to keep some test servers in sync with systems at our hosting
> provider that use a satellite RHN server that I can’t access from my test
> servers.
>
>
>
> I appreciate your response.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Seth Stone
>
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