[CentOS-virt] Apparent discontinuity between advertised centos7 release 1803_01 and content of centos-release file

Thu Apr 19 17:56:06 UTC 2018
Scott Dowdle <dowdle at montanalinux.org>

Greetings,

----- Original Message -----
> Hello,
> 
> I searched centos7 in the AWS marketplace for the
> at-time-of-writing-latest centos7 image:
> https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00O7WM7QW?qid=1524138193326&sr=0-1&ref_=srh_res_product_title
> 
> I built a standard free tier t2.micro from this putative 1803_01 AMI.
> I see from the docs, this is thus a March 2018 compilation.
> When I get CLI, I get this:
> 
> [centos at ip-172-31-27-32 etc]$ cat centos-release
> CentOS Linux release 7.4.1708 (Core)
> 
> which suggests that the AMI I just launched was built on a version of
> centos compiled from upstream sources in August 2017.
> Does the release of centos7 on the marketplace sport a release
> version which does not pertain to the machine's release? Unlike with
> releases published outside AWS, the Centos cloud page does not
> specify version info as listed on AWS.
> 
> Thanks v much IA,

RHEL releases about every 6 months... and then CentOS lags behind a little bit as a rebuilder.

The most current release of CentOS is based on RHEL 7.4... and is dated August 2017 (1708).  RHEL 7.5 was released a week or so ago and CentOS is frantically working on coming out with CentOS release based on it.  When that comes out, the latest release will be 1804 (or 1805, etc).

That doesn't mean there aren't in-between release updates because there are... but they don't re-number the whole release because of regular updates.

CentOS has a lot of products that they produce and some of them may be rebuilt and distributed more frequently (like CentOS Atomic Host or their Vagrant image, etc)... but not the oldest, main product.

Did that answer your question?

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
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