Why? The current CentOS kernel isn't anywhere near the latest, nor is a fair bit of other stuff in CentOS 5.5. And there are lots of folks running yr-old releases.
I... I... I don't really know how to answer this one...
Anyone who is running *CentOS* from a year ago is strongly urged to upgrade... they always have been on this list. There have been plenty of bug fixes over the course of the past year in CentOS and it would have to take a very 'special' set of circumstances not to be at the very least on the last point release if not all updates for security and bug reasons.
I think you need to differentiate between a major and minor product release and how to deal with a product under heavy development. Spacewalk does not have branches that get backported fixes - as indeed Redhat backports fixes from current software to the older they ship when appropriate.
If you showed up on the Spacewalk mailing list saying you have a 0.5 instance with X problem the first thing to be said is at least get up to 1.0 as there have been so many bug fixes over a year that it becomes difficult to troubleshoot an issue and any fix found will not be backported to 0.5 but rather released as either a hotfix to the current version or fixed in the next release.
Your comment would be like complaining about the state of say KVM a year ago and refusing to update CentOS to at least 5.5 (if not current) to get the numerous bug fixes that have gone in over that time.
I was on the mailing list. Did they ever put the change to the documentation that I sent in, that I found, about the settings required to make Oracle happy to work with it?
<snip> mark
I did mention a dependency on Oracle. I, and others, followed the instructions on the wiki and got an instance running fine. What did you mention specifically? Looking at the website there are steps to follow for oracle:
https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/OracleXeSetup
Please only comment on stuff you have genuine *current* knowledge of and not something you dabbled in a year ago... technology changes quickly especially in a product under heavy and active development.
James