[CentOS] Centos long end of life support, but im interested in packages themselves.

[Johnny Hughes]

On 03/23/2012 02:16 AM, Brent Clark wrote:
> Hi Guys
>
> Im hoping someone would be so kind to answer my question.
>
> Where I work we are currently reviewing and making use of Centos, because of its long end of life support.
>
> CentOS-6 updates until November 30, 2020
>
> The question I would like to ask is.
> Say Centos 6 offers and makes use of PHP 5.3. Say as time goes on PHP themselves deprecate 5.3 and EOL is reached.
> Would Centos 6 continue to offer security and bug fixes support for PHP 5.3 till November 30, 2020?
>
> If someone could help me understand this, it would be appreciated.
>
> Kindest Regards
> Brent Clark

The answer to your question is not cut and dry ... and as others have
said, it totally depends on what is done upstream by Red Hat and
released in their Source stream.  CentOS just builds whatever they
release for as long as they release it.  If they extend their lifetimes
and continue to release the code, then we will continue to build and
release it too.

Also, the type of package you are talking about impacts the answer too.

Please see the backporting blurb here:
https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting/

For Server type packages, like in your example php, the answer is that
they almost always maintain the same Major/Minor version and just
backport security fixes.

But, for desktop applications, like OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird,
etc., they will move to newer items.  As an example, CentOS 5.0 had
firefox-1.5.0.9-10.el5.centos.src.rpm ... and now we have
firefox-10.0.3-1.el5.centos.src.rpm.  So some things, necessary for
workstation type installs, will move ahead during the period.  But
server packages will generally maintain ABI/API compatibility (so
basically php-5.3.x and httpd-2.2.x, etc will be maintained the whole time).

Sometimes they will add new things on top of the old ... like when they
added php53-5.3.x as well as php-5.1.9 to CentOS-5.

Hopefully this answers your question.

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