[CentOS] Best way to hold at 5.3 release

[Kwan Lowe]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 9:25 PM, Joseph L. Casale
<jcasale at activenetwerx.com> wrote:
> I need to do some testing with 5.3 as its suggested that 5.4 has
> "some bugs in the toolchain and libc". That being the case, I can
> install with a url and repo line pointing to a mirror with 5.3 still
> but how does one properly make sure during subsequent uses of yum it
> doesn't attempt to use 5.4 rpms?
>
> Is it simple enough to just manually set '$releasever' to 5.3 in the
> repo file or do I need to do anything else?
>
> What actually happens to the 5.3 repo so that `yum update` actually
> switches repo's when one is available?

I think there may be some confusion about what the 5.3 and 5.4
represents... How it was explained to me was that 5.4 is just a tag of
a particular date of the 5.x tree, as was 5.3 and 5.2.  In other
words, there are no packages specific to 5.4, just a continuous set of
updates to the 5.x tree.  At some point you'll get a new package -- I
believe from the centos-release package -- that bumps up the
releasever string.

At work we're using RedHat with Satellite and manage the updates with
specific clone channels from the RHEL5 tree. That is, when updates get
published we manually add them to our custom channels in preparation
for deployment.

On the CentOS side I've been experimenting with the Spacewalk project
and it appears to allow us to do the same thing.  Setup takes an hour
or so for the initial configuration then another couple hours to get
all the package information and binaries prepared.