On 06/20/2014 02:52 PM, Nathanael D. Noblet 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. > > So as a user that has never paid for RHEL I wasn't 100% aware that this > existed. I've always basically kept my systems up to date just assuming > that the point releases were kind of like Microsoft's Service Pack X. > Having never paid for a fix to be ported to a previous Service Pack > level its not till today that it makes sense that MS would allow clients > to pay for that kind of service. > > All this to say is that I never thought I could stay on a point release. > Also I'm wondering if someone doesn't update the centos-release-6.5 rpm > won't they still be getting updates anyway? I just checked it it looks > like you are. We handle this by pointing the yum repositories at the major version. So /6/ instead of /6.5/ for example. When 6.6 comes out, we'll alter the symlink to point /6/ to the 6.6 tree instead of the 6.5 tree. The problem with this is that you'll either have users who NEVER update, or they update but never know what version they're on. The users who don't update tend to fall into two camps: 1. It's working, DON'T TOUCH IT! 2. My vendor for $foo told me it's only supported on this one specific version so I'm staying there no matter what. > Here's my simplistic suggestion, don't maintain those older trees. One > tree lastest version for the major version. This is the clearest signal > that there is only ever one area where updates occur. Or if there is a > good reason to keep older packages in their own point release, make the > centos-release always point to the 'latest' repo. As in it doesn't > matter if I have centos-release-6.2/6.3/6.4 they always point > at /repo/latest? > That's mostly what we do, via the symlink method explained above. On our mirrors, we only keep the latest tree. We do however archive legacy trees on the vault mirrors so that people who need to duplicate an environment from a given time period can do so. You'd be amazed how often people have to recreate the past. -- Jim Perrin The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org twitter: @BitIntegrity | GPG Key: FA09AD77