[CentOS-devel] CentOS 7 and release numbering

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Nathanael D. Noblet <nathanael at gnat.ca> wrote:
>
> So this is the clearest explanation - not sure why it wasn't clearer to
> me earlier. I mean I got the basic idea, once RHEL moves on to a newer
> point release updates to their previous point releases costs money and
> is not available for CentOS to rebuild and maintain an identical tree.

When a service exists that 'costs money', it implies that there are
situations that require customers to pay for it. Which would be some
application/configuration where doing the next point update will cause
known breakage or at least requires some lengthy testing before
proceeding.

> Here's my simplistic suggestion, don't maintain those older trees.

They don't now.  At the point releases, all of the old intermediate
updates go to the vault so the mirror sites don't have to store them
and updates only go all the way to current.   But, if you had to
reconstruct a back-rev system that had some, but not current updates
(and given the situations where current updates cause breakages, there
can be reasons to want to do that) it is very difficult.   Say you
wanted to re-create a 6.3 CentOS with updates up to just before 6.4
was released you'd probably have to look at the timestamp on every
package in the vault and download/install  each package in the
relevant timeframe.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com