[CentOS-devel] Why not a fusion between CentOS and SL?

[Lamar Owen]

On Thursday, March 24, 2011 08:51:30 am Les Mikesell wrote:
> Also note that you can't just 'yum update' from those SL alpha versions to the 
> final release, so even if CentOS did ship alpha/beta versions it wouldn't make 
> life that much easier.  

The problem with updates from a rolling alpha/beta to the GA release is that it is possible that the package contents change but the epoch:version-release tuple doesn't; especially given a rebuild of the upstream source package (which cannot have its EVR changed and maintain strict compatibility) due to things like the libtalloc versioning situation previously mentioned.

I haven't checked to see if it's implemented in EL6, but this sounds like a situation tailor-made for yum distro-sync.  I'm not sure, however, how distro-sync acts when packages are actually different but their EVR stays the same.