Hi,
On Tue, Aug 05, 2008 at 11:10:35AM -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote:
On Tuesday, August 05, 2008 12:43 PM -0500 Jerry Amundson jamundso@gmail.com wrote:
Some interesting text at the bottom of that page, justifying exclusion of RPMForge's disttags:
RPMForge precedes the distribution value with a numeric value, designed to assist in upgrades between versions of Red Hat Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora. I really don't think that an upgrade path between RHEL and Fedora is viable, or something that we should attempt to promote. If Fedora used the same dist tags, we'd be implying that there was support for upgrading between drastically different distributions. It also adds an extra layer of complexity to the Release field, confusing users and new packagers.
Is not RHEL (and, by extension, CentOS) a cherry-picked snapshot of Fedora? Will the next RHEL not be some slice of Fedora? If RHEL comes from Fedora, then at some point in time the current RHEL will need to be upgradable to some extraction of Fedora.
The above text refers to making CentOS5 say be between FC6 and F7. The disttags like 0.fc6, 1.el5, 2.f7 (just examples, the real ones look a bit different) ensure that FC6 < EL5 < F7 in rpm semantics.
What the text says is that RHEL does not want to be considered as a linear succession to Fedora and a upcoming Fedora release a succession to this, but rather as a fork from FC6 with its own evolution that didn't necessarily flow back to F7.
Also RHEL/CentOS/SL/etc are a subset of Fedora, so a larger FC6 install will not fully upgrade to CentOS5.
In general while it is quite possible to upgrade (or sidegrade?) from CentOS to Fedora and the other way around, the general approach should be a fresh install when doing that.
Other than that I think Fedora and RHEL clearly accept their intertwined relationship. Neither could exist w/o the other.