On Thu, 2005-11-24 at 12:00 -0600, Johnny Hughes wrote:
It's called a local mirror
I have to agree with Johnny. If you're maintaining any number of systems, take it upon yourself to maintain a local mirror and rsync. Tag updates in your YUM (or other) repository appropriately until you have tested them. Then retag them appropriately when you have found a release with packages that are all inter-working well.
No OS solves this completely. Configuration management isn't optional, although I would argue that Linux (especially less changing Enterprise Linux) is as ideal as it can get. If you want some help in this regard, Red Hat's tools with their subscriptions are very helpful.
But, again, it doesn't solve the 3rd party equation. That's what Fedora is trying to do, although most with differ on the results (and even I have to concede there is a lot of room left for improvement).