CentOS vs stability: req a Fedora / RHEL perspective

[Les Mikesell]

Tony Nelson wrote:

>>> 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?

Yes - but there is rarely a reason to do that with stock centos packages.

>>> 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.

I'd guess that's the biggest set of changes we'll see for 4.x.  I had 
3.x servers in production before 4.x was released and had to pick 
something for a larger rollout right after its release and went with the 
sure thing.  Even a few months later I would have used 4.x and just been 
a little more careful about testing the new kernels before updating the 
remote boxes.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com