On 12/22/20 10:36 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
It's why I say they're taags" and find the model mentioned here that "it's all one branch" to not match reality
For fun, I'll try again:
RHEL point releases are branches. 7.6 is a branch. 7.7 is a branch. You can continue running 7.6 and receive security updates after 7.7 is released. Those updates may include packages built specifically for 7.6, and not just a selection of the packages for 7.7. They're maintained in parallel, at the same time. They're branches.
CentOS point releases weren't individual branches. There was only one CentOS 7 branch. CentOS 7.6 was just a point in time along the lifetime of CentOS 7. 7.6 is not literally a tag, but it's the closest analogy. There was no continued support for CentOS 7.6 after CentOS 7.7 was released. If there's no parallel maintenance, there is only one branch.
In an VCS, you can create a branch and continue work, and later create another branch off of that and continue work, but if you never add any work to an older branch after a new branch is created, then you're only using branches in a very superficial sense. There are technically branches, but there's no difference in that workflow between several branches and just one, because you have just one linear history containing every commit. This resembles CentOS updates.
RHEL point releases get updates that aren't just updates for a later release. As an analogy, there are updates in the older branches that aren't in the new branches, unlike CentOS.
CentOS has just one branch:
* 7.5 \ * 7.6 \ * 7.7
RHEL has multiple branches that overlap in time:
* ---- 7.5 \ * ---- 7.6 \ * ---- 7.7