Pardon the newbie question, but I thought I'd check with you guys here since I couldn't find the answer to this one on CentOS web site.
I installed CentOS 3.4 (needed an equivalent of RHEL 3.4 for a very specific purpose - not interested in newer releases at this point) and downloaded all available up2date stuff. However, Apache is at v2.0.46, php is at 4.3.4, and so on - which are all quite old versions. I was under the impression that Red Hat rolls updates into existing versions and what may show as Apache 2.0.46, may indeed include updates and patches that are available in the most current release, 2.0.54..... Is this the case here, with CentOS, or should I be looking somewhere for actual rpms for Apache, php, and so on, to bring them up to 'latest' standards? If so - where?? up2date doesn't seem to be loading anything more current than what I mentioned above.
If current patches are rolled into old versions, how does one distinguish between the "old" Apache 2.0.46 and "new/patched" 2.0.46??
Thanks,
Chris
On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 10:17:20PM -0700, Chris (CentOS list) wrote:
I installed CentOS 3.4 (needed an equivalent of RHEL 3.4 for a very specific purpose - not interested in newer releases at this point) and downloaded all available up2date stuff. However, Apache is at v2.0.46, php is at 4.3.4, and so on - which are all quite old versions. I was under the impression that Red Hat rolls updates into existing versions and what may show as Apache 2.0.46, may indeed include updates and patches that are available in the most current release, 2.0.54..... Is this the case here, with CentOS, or should I be looking somewhere for actual rpms for Apache, php, and so on, to bring them up to 'latest' standards? If so - where?? up2date doesn't seem to be loading anything more current than what I mentioned above.
Security fixes are back-ported, but not new features.
If current patches are rolled into old versions, how does one distinguish between the "old" Apache 2.0.46 and "new/patched" 2.0.46??
The RPM version number and the changelogs/patches in the SRPMS.
On Thu, 2005-06-30 at 22:17 -0700, Chris (CentOS list) wrote:
Pardon the newbie question, but I thought I'd check with you guys here since I couldn't find the answer to this one on CentOS web site.
I installed CentOS 3.4 (needed an equivalent of RHEL 3.4 for a very specific purpose - not interested in newer releases at this point) and downloaded all available up2date stuff. However, Apache is at v2.0.46, php is at 4.3.4, and so on - which are all quite old versions. I was under the impression that Red Hat rolls updates into existing versions and what may show as Apache 2.0.46, may indeed include updates and patches that are available in the most current release, 2.0.54..... Is this the case here, with CentOS, or should I be looking somewhere for actual rpms for Apache, php, and so on, to bring them up to 'latest' standards? If so - where?? up2date doesn't seem to be loading anything more current than what I mentioned above.
If current patches are rolled into old versions, how does one distinguish between the "old" Apache 2.0.46 and "new/patched" 2.0.46??
Chris,
RHEL is about stability and not the latest version. They don't roll in all aspects of the new versions ... just the new security updates.
Once a major item is in RHEL, they won't roll in changes that cause things not to work.
So, some things (for example firefox, mozilla) will get upgraded totally as time goes on. Other things like KDE, OpenOffice.org, Gnome, Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc. are probably not going to move to newer major version. These will just get any security issues and bugs fixed.
See the RH backporting policy: http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_backport.html
All the security issues will be fixed ... other things, maybe not. ------------------------- So, you basically need to decide between the two concepts. Do you want the latest and greatest versions or do you want stability with backporting?
If you want latest and greatest (and not just security updates with backporting), then RHEL (and therefore CentOS, since we use the same sources to build our updates) is probably not going to meet your needs. cAos or Fedora (if you like RH like OSes); Debian testing or Ubuntu (if you like .deb); or Gentoo are likely better choices if you want to continually get newer technology fast.
CentOS will be OK if you want to make those changes on an 18 month cycle and not a 6 month cycle though. As new RHEL versions come out (and they will have newer products in RHEL 5 and RHEL 6, etc.) ... the versions of everything will go up then.
CentOS can be slightly newer than RHEL in the centosplus repository:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/centosplus/
So, there will be some things there (like PHP5, a kernel with more features turned on, some extra filesystems, and probably OpenOffice.org 2.0 when it is released). But, CentOS Plus will not make CentOS be Fedora, nor will it be like Debian testing. Everything added will be able to be used with other existing CentOS-4 programs ... and not everything will be changed.
Hopefully, the answer to your question is in there somewhere :)
On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 00:49 -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Thu, 2005-06-30 at 22:17 -0700, Chris (CentOS list) wrote:
Pardon the newbie question, but I thought I'd check with you guys here since I couldn't find the answer to this one on CentOS web site.
I installed CentOS 3.4 (needed an equivalent of RHEL 3.4 for a very specific purpose - not interested in newer releases at this point) and downloaded all available up2date stuff. However, Apache is at v2.0.46, php is at 4.3.4, and so on - which are all quite old versions. I was under the impression that Red Hat rolls updates into existing versions and what may show as Apache 2.0.46, may indeed include updates and patches that are available in the most current release, 2.0.54..... Is this the case here, with CentOS, or should I be looking somewhere for actual rpms for Apache, php, and so on, to bring them up to 'latest' standards? If so - where?? up2date doesn't seem to be loading anything more current than what I mentioned above.
If current patches are rolled into old versions, how does one distinguish between the "old" Apache 2.0.46 and "new/patched" 2.0.46??
Chris,
RHEL is about stability and not the latest version. They don't roll in all aspects of the new versions ... just the new security updates.
Once a major item is in RHEL, they won't roll in changes that cause things not to work.
So, some things (for example firefox, mozilla) will get upgraded totally as time goes on. Other things like KDE, OpenOffice.org, Gnome, Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc. are probably not going to move to newer major version. These will just get any security issues and bugs fixed.
See the RH backporting policy: http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_backport.html
All the security issues will be fixed ... other things, maybe not.
So, you basically need to decide between the two concepts. Do you want the latest and greatest versions or do you want stability with backporting?
If you want latest and greatest (and not just security updates with backporting), then RHEL (and therefore CentOS, since we use the same sources to build our updates) is probably not going to meet your needs. cAos or Fedora (if you like RH like OSes); Debian testing or Ubuntu (if you like .deb); or Gentoo are likely better choices if you want to continually get newer technology fast.
CentOS will be OK if you want to make those changes on an 18 month cycle and not a 6 month cycle though. As new RHEL versions come out (and they will have newer products in RHEL 5 and RHEL 6, etc.) ... the versions of everything will go up then.
CentOS can be slightly newer than RHEL in the centosplus repository:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/centosplus/
So, there will be some things there (like PHP5, a kernel with more features turned on, some extra filesystems, and probably OpenOffice.org 2.0 when it is released). But, CentOS Plus will not make CentOS be Fedora, nor will it be like Debian testing. Everything added will be able to be used with other existing CentOS-4 programs ... and not everything will be changed.
Hopefully, the answer to your question is in there somewhere :)
oh ... and my specific version numbers given for centosplus and talk of firefox was related to CentOS-4 and not CentOS-3 or CentOS-2 :) (though, if you remove the specific version numbers, then conceptually the rest applies to any version of CentOS)
-
Alan Hodgson -
Chris (CentOS list) -
Johnny Hughes