On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 14:09 +0100, Alexander Dalloz wrote:

Am Fr, den 11.11.2005 schrieb Mark Quitoriano um 13:30:

...

Got a question with centos/rhel php versions. because in centos 3 they're still using 4.3.2 and centos 4 which uses 4.3.9. how about the bugfixes done in 4.4 and 4.4.1? centos/rhel updates regularly like centos 3 which already updated for 6 times but still uses 4.3.2? is that mean we still suffer the bugs of the original 4.3.2?

...

Mark Quitoriano, CCNA

That topic has been asked many time on this list, and was answered too. Please read

http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_backport.html

about the work done by the PNAELV.

And to expound on the back porting just a bit ... (pulls out the Soap Box :)

One of the most important things about an Enterprise OS is that once it is configured, the majority of the packages will not have major changes in the way they work ... especially critical, server type items like httpd, dhcpd, named, nfs, lvm, etc.

Also, things like the kernel, glibc, gcc, etc. need to remain relatively constant (except for fixing bugs / security).

This is because people who just spent $150,000 to have someone build a new webapp get pretty pissed when it doesn't compile because we wanted to move from apache 2.0.52 to 2.0.54 ... or move from 3.4.2 to 3.4.4 gcc.

Basically, except for some minor things (like the web browsers, etc.) ... the major versions of a package are going to stay the same throughout the lifetime of an Enterprise OS.

That means that CentOS-4 (until it retires in 2012) will most likely always have 2.0.52 apache, 2.8.x Gnome, 3.3.x KDE, 4.3.9 php, 2.6.9-x kerenl, etc. Although new updates will happen that add some functionality, fix bugs, and fix security issues it won't usually be major changes.

Every 18-24 months a new version (next being CentOS-5) will be released, and that will have new technology ... but it will likewise have it's major packages frozen at it's release levels for it's lifetime.