[CentOS-devel] moving the CR repo into mainstream release

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Greg Lindahl <greg at blekko.com> wrote:
>> What stability problems would you expect from updates beyond a point
>> release?  The whole point of an 'enterprise' distribution is the
>> effort they make to not break api's across a whole major-rev's life.
>> Would an upstream system break if you selectively update packages
>> beyond a point release without doing a full update?
>
> Upstream has never tested the combination of packages available in CR.
> It's easily possible that package A depends on package B being updated
> to avoid an obscure bug, but the CR only has A's update. Gentoo users
> are quite familiar with this issue.

Version dependencies are supposed to be noted in the rpms and this
isn't gentoo - the apis aren't generally supposed to be changing at
all or you couldn't expect your own and 3rd party applications to
continue to run.

> It is likely that many CentOS users think they aren't bothered by
> these issues, but CentOS is used in a lot of production environments,
> and I bet there will be some surprises.

I've fairly routinely updated individual packages only across minor
rev changes or held some back without problems.  Your argument would
be more convincing if you had several examples of update combinations
not prevented by package dependencies that will break something.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com