Timothy Murphy wrote:
Rudi Ahlers wrote:
Are you saying that simply running "yum update" on a Centos-5.1 system will convert it to Centos-5.2, as and when that is released?
All upgrades / updates in the major versions (5.0 -> 5.1 -> 5.1) will happen automatically when you run yum upgrade, and when it's officially released for updates. And I'm almost certain most, if not every, other Linux distro also works like this
Well, I never heard of a Fedora 9.1 distribution that could be "yum upgrade"d to Fedora 9.2 . IIRC, when RedHat (occasionally) had versions 8.1 and 8.2 they were completely different.
Sorry to be dumb, but what is the point of calling it Centos-5.2? Is it just that if installing Centos from scratch, one could download a more up-to-date version?
Sure, not everyone follow the sub-version / minor version path for software, but even in Fedora Core, you'd find Xen 3.0, Xen 3.1, Xen 3.2, etc
Sub versions (i.e. CentOS 5.1 / 5.2) are normally minor upgrades within the major version, whereas major versions in most software distributions often involve large changes (like adding / removing new / old architectures, or major kernel upgrades, or totally new features / software / scripts).
Bear in mind that FC is almost a tottaly different distro than CentOS and they aim at the cutting edge stuff, yet their numbering works with major numbers. I'm sure there's a better explanation on their forum / mailing list / website why they follow that route, but (*)Ubuntu, Slackware, Suse, Debian, FreeBSD (Yes, I know it's not Linux, but it's an example), Mandriva, Red Hat, etc all have major & minor numbers, hence my comment, "
And I'm almost certain most, if not every, other Linux distro also works like this"