[CentOS] release/update question

[Matthias Leopold]

hi,

since i don't use centos very heavily i'm not too familiar with the
centos/rhel release/update process (and i didn't do much research on this):

is it normal behavior that through the use of "yum update" systems are
forced to follow the point releases of a major release (5.0 -> 5.1 ->
5.2, etc)? is there a way and would it make sense to stay within one
particular release and receive only security updates? or is this
question pointless because point releases _are_ only security updates?

thx for teaching a debian user

matthias