[CentOS-devel] Package backports - 5.4 kernel

Tue Sep 22 01:20:16 UTC 2009
John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org>

Jason Parker wrote:
> According to upstream release notes, there were API/ABI changes with OFED stuff.
>  If userspace is not updated accordingly, it is very likely that there will be
> breakage.
> 
> There were several other things in the upstream release notes that I don't see
> mentioned anywhere with this kernel release (examples: ext4dev, bonding+ipv6).
> Are there plans to do this?  As the release is already syncing to mirrors, I
> suspect the answer is "no".
> 
> I can't agree with this new policy, and I hope these comments demonstrate why.

Vaguely related to this, I have some systems I installed from Scientific 
Linux, another RHEL clone, but satisfying needs that CentOS didn't at 
the time I did the installation.

Recently, I discovered yum-autoupdates running. It automatically 
downloads and installs updates.

It's my view that the responsibility for applying updates to systems I 
administer is mine and mine alone. I might choose to use something like 
yum-autoupdates to download them (highly improbable in my case), but not 
even Microsoft does it without the owners' explicit consent.

Here is one simple reason:

If I download and install some updates, and then something breaks, there 
is some prospect I might connect the events. If I don't know about the 
changes, I have no chance.

Downloading updates is one, on my C4 systems I have a cron job that does 
just that, using up2date.

I have not, so far as I can recall, had a serious breakage on any RHEL 
clone that resulted in the system not booting, but there were several 
Fedora kernels terminally incompatible with, first, a laptop. and later 
some HP desktops.

However sure I am that RH and CentOS (or the SL folk or that matter) 
test their stuff, it's my call as to whether it's fit for my use.

I trust CentOS won't follow the path of inflicting updates on users in 
that manner. Even automatically downloading changes should not be done 
without consent, user may have preferences as to time of day (bandwidth 
management) and repos used. Some might have local repos mirrored from 
official ones, I've certainly done that at times.

I've updated my repo configurations to update from CentOS, and all seems 
well.



-- 

Cheers
John

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