On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote: > On Tuesday, November 01, 2011 12:19:31 PM Les Mikesell 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? > > If the absolute ABI didn't occasionally break from upstream, Scientific Linux would likely not do point releases the way that they do them. > What do you mean? They do point releases so you have the option to install something that is not horribly out of date. I thought they rolled out updates into the new point release as they built them, not waiting for a complete set and install media - and that they had always done it that way so there was no expectation of getting updates otherwise. That is, they set up the mechanism before anyone could know whether point releases would break working 3rd party binaries or not. But not having such breakage is the main reason to be running RHEL or a clone. If rebuilding from the stock source produces an incompatible binary, that is something else. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com