On Thu, 2015-04-02 at 00:51 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
Nor do I see it as an improvement.
Thank you for your considered response. If it is not an improvement, then there is no reason for the change, is there ?
In my opinion, assigning sub-version numbers to what was originally intended to be, by Red Hat, quarterly updates (almost Service Packs, if you will, much like SGI's numbering of their Foundation and ProPack products for the Altix server line) is what is illogical. Of course, the updates aren't quarterly any more, and other aspects of the versioning have morphed and changed over the years since the RHAS days (well, even back in certain branches of RHL 6.2, for that matter).
Whatever the original cause introducing sub-version numbering, that usage has become a clear progressive indicator of collections of updates within the major version.
in reality the update number is meaningless for compatibility checks, as it is more than possible to have a fully updated CentOS x system that claims to be x.0 but has all the packages, save centos-release, of the latest x.y; further, it is easily possible to install the CentOS x.6 centos-release package on a completely unpatched x.0 system, making the contents of andy of the /etc/*-release files not terribly useful for strict versioning.
I image the vast majority of Centos users will not risk doing non-standard updates on their production systems so your above concern is unlikely to occur.
Creating confusion where there was originally none is essentially silly.
I am not so easily confused by the new numbering;
I can not look at something labelled Centos 7.2169 and instantly know if it is Centos 7.1, 7.5 or even Centos 7.10. What's the latest version of Centos 6 ? Is it 6.32167 or 6.32782 or 6.32783 or should I be typing 6.23783 instead ? Confusion is not clarity.
How many times has Johnny and others asserted that Centos is the same as RHEL ?
The assertion is that CentOS is functionally equivalent to the upstream product.
If Centos is "functionally equivalent" to RHEL then common sense must dictate that the sub-version numbers should be compatible too.