On Feb 7, 2012, at 8:07 AM, Ross Walker wrote:
On Feb 7, 2012, at 7:58 AM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:
The purpose for having enterprise software is so that you can get a return on your investment and use your code for 7 years (for CentOS versions before CentOS-4 ... now 10 years in post CentOS-5). But keeping things for that period of time means that when you do need to upgrade, the "differences" are much harder and the changes are usually much bigger for a given package.
For this reason it is often better to upgrade more frequently then every 7-10 years. Personally I have a 5 year max lifetime for my systems. Even then upgrades are painful and we try to stagger these so they all aren't due to upgrade at once.
---- if you think about it, perhaps you are making the case for using a configuration management system like puppet where the configuration details are more or less abstracted from the underlying OS itself. Thus once running (and I'm not suggesting that it is a simple task), migrating servers from CentOS 5.x to 6.x or perhaps to Debian or Ubuntu becomes a relatively simple task as the configuration details come from the puppet server.
This becomes more evident when you stop looking at a server being a single OS install on a single box and start running virtualized servers.
Craig