Ian Murray wrote:
This applies to 5.X as it stands, as 4.X. Once RH 5.4 hits the streets, then CentOS 5 users will be in the same boat. I would hope nobody feels they are getting beaten up about this. The intention is not to beat anybody up. Anyway, I am going to try *really* hard not to post on the matter again (I said that yesterday, but I am going to try *harder*) because I am just repeating myself now, which may come across as brow-beating.
Look ... either use it or not, how many times do we have to hear this?
The same people keep posting the same things.
Everything for 4.8 is built and in qa testing, including the updates after 4.8. We have a COMMUNITY QA team that we have test our distro, this adds a couple weeks to the process. I thought you guys liked community things. This adds a week or two to the release cycle.
4.8 should be released in a couple days as soon as the QA team finishes, assuming there are no major issues (which is how it is looking right now).
If you want the updates when Red Hat releases them, buy Red Hat.
We have a process to release normal updates without the QA team and a QA team period for point releases ... it takes time.
I keep hearing Scientific Linux this and that ... Go back and look at release dates for all the releases and you will see this:
Release SciLinux CentOS 4.0 2005-04-21 2005-03-02 4.1 2005-08-06 2005-06-12 4.2 2005-12-03 2005-10-13 4.3 2006-05-08 2006-03-21 4.4 2006-10-10 2006-08-30 4.5 2007-06-26 2007-05-18 4.6 2008-03-10 2007-12-16 4.7 2008-09-03 2008-09-13 4.8 2009-07-21 *In QA
5.0 2007-05-07 2007-04-12 5.1 2008-01-16 2007-12-02 5.2 2008-06-28 2008-06-24 5.3 2009-03-19 2009-04-01
I post these only to show that in general, the dates are similar with CentOS usually finishing faster.
I do not know how they QA test their distro or if they compare the binaries to upstream like CentOS does. I do know that they do more mods to the base OS than CentOS does:
https://www.scientificlinux.org/about/customize
I also point out that it takes at least a couple of days for us to sync to all the external mirrors so that we can distribute to our millions of users when we update (300ish mirrors in 56 countries world wide). We hold off our release announcement until after most of the external mirrors are updated.
This is taking nothing away from Scientific Linux, they make a great distro. If I was not using CentOS, I would surely be using SL. I'll not bash them on this list, they are good people and do good work. I also have no idea what kind of mirror distribution they have for updates. If you want answers to these questions, I would suggest the SL Mailing lists.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes