[rhn-users] Stay on minor release

[Seth Stone]

This is kind of an side question: What event actually causes /etc/redhat-release to be updated?  Is it once you get all the packages for a certain release or is there just a key package that  causes the increment?
 
From: rhn-users-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:rhn-users-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Felipe Massia
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 12:58 PM
To: Discussions about Red Hat Network (rhn.redhat.com)
Subject: Re: [rhn-users] Stay on minor release
 
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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