[CentOS] Volume of patches for CentOS vs Fedora

[Chris Mauritz]

Steve Bergman wrote:
> I'm trying to come to a decision between CentOS 4.2 and Fedora Core 4 
> for use on a server.  One of the things the server will be serving is 
> X desktops so there are some advantages to Fedora.
>
> However, one thing I can't help but notice is that the patch volume 
> for FC4 from Oct 11 2005 thru the present compared to CentOS 4.2 for 
> the same period is about 5 times greater.  In fact, since June, there 
> are 899 RPMs in the FC4 updates directory for FC4 which seems 
> absolutely insane.
>
> CentOS is a smaller distro, but not that much smaller.  Also, I 
> understand that CentOS's parent distro (from a prominent North 
> American Linux Distributor) is supposed to be better tested before 
> release than Fedora.  But still, there must be some other factor to 
> explain the disparity.  Like CentOS only releasing a patch for 
> security problems and not bug fixes or something like that.
>
> Could someone enlighten me?

CentOS is effectively (whether the maintainers are allowed to say it or 
not) Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  It's *supposed* to be rock solid and 
patches are only applied when necessary to fix security or serious 
usability issues.  FC4 is a development distro that is designed to flesh 
things out before (drumroll please) they are considered to be applied to 
the more stable RHEL source tree.  So there are supposed to be more 
patches to FC4.  It's by design.  That said, if I was going to use a 
server for real work in a production environment, there is no way I'd 
use FC4 and I'd stick to something a bit more "boring/stable" like 
CentOS or RHEL.

Cheers,