[rhn-users] Stay on minor release

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

On 11/24/2009 07:58 PM, Felipe Massia wrote:
> 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.
> 

That's not entirely true, although obviously 5.5 would include the same
security- and bug-fixes released for point releases prior to 5.5.

The minor releases are also the point in time where Red Hat may upgrade
a certain piece of software, and may be including (backports of) drivers
for new hardware, or new kernel features (KVM anyone?).

One example of the inclusion of upgrades to a piece of software is the
inclusion of a more recent version of Firefox in a point release (I
believe it was 5.2).

It's not like updating 5.4 before 5.5 is released brings you closer to
5.5 if you look at it from the perspective of how 5.5 as a whole may
change compared to 5.4.

We (the Fedora Project Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux[1] packagers)
have seen similar things happen nearly every point release of RHEL so
far. Packages that were part of EPEL may, given a point release, all of
a sudden be part of RHEL and packages that were part of RHEL may be
dropped from the distribution.

Kind regards,

-- Jeroen