[CentOS] CentOS newbie question - updates

Fri Jul 1 06:05:19 UTC 2005
Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com>

On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 00:49 -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-06-30 at 22:17 -0700, Chris (CentOS list) wrote:
> > Pardon the newbie question, but I thought I'd check with you guys here since 
> > I couldn't find the answer to this one on CentOS web site.
> > 
> > I installed CentOS 3.4 (needed an equivalent of RHEL 3.4 for a very specific 
> > purpose - not interested in newer releases at this point) and downloaded all 
> > available up2date stuff.  However, Apache is at v2.0.46, php is at 4.3.4, 
> > and so on - which are all quite old versions.  I was under the impression 
> > that Red Hat rolls updates into existing versions and what may show as 
> > Apache 2.0.46, may indeed include updates and patches that are available in 
> > the most current release, 2.0.54.....  Is this the case here, with CentOS, 
> > or should I be looking somewhere for actual rpms for Apache, php, and so on, 
> > to bring them up to 'latest' standards?  If so - where??  up2date doesn't 
> > seem to be loading anything more current than what I mentioned above.
> > 
> > If current patches are rolled into old versions, how does one distinguish 
> > between the "old" Apache 2.0.46 and "new/patched" 2.0.46??
> > 
> 
> Chris,
> 
> RHEL is about stability and not the latest version.  They don't roll in
> all aspects of the new versions ... just the new security updates.
> 
> Once a major item is in RHEL, they won't roll in changes that cause
> things not to work.
> 
> So, some things (for example firefox, mozilla) will get upgraded totally
> as time goes on.  Other things like KDE, OpenOffice.org, Gnome, Apache,
> PHP, MySQL, etc. are probably not going to move to newer major version.
> These will just get any security issues and bugs fixed.
> 
> See the RH backporting policy:
> http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_backport.html
> 
> All the security issues will be fixed ... other things, maybe not.
> -------------------------
> So, you basically need to decide between the two concepts.  Do you want
> the latest and greatest versions or do you want stability with
> backporting?
> 
> If you want latest and greatest (and not just security updates with
> backporting), then RHEL (and therefore CentOS, since we use the same
> sources to build our updates) is probably not going to meet your needs.
> cAos or Fedora (if you like RH like OSes); Debian testing or Ubuntu (if
> you like .deb); or Gentoo are likely better choices if you want to
> continually get newer technology fast.
> 
> CentOS will be OK if you want to make those changes on an 18 month cycle
> and not a 6 month cycle though.  As new RHEL versions come out (and they
> will have newer products in RHEL 5 and RHEL 6, etc.) ... the versions of
> everything will go up then.
> 
> CentOS can be slightly newer than RHEL in the centosplus repository:
> 
> http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/centosplus/
> 
> So, there will be some things there (like PHP5, a kernel with more
> features turned on, some extra filesystems, and probably OpenOffice.org
> 2.0 when it is released).  But, CentOS Plus will not make CentOS be
> Fedora, nor will it be like Debian testing.  Everything added will be
> able to be used with other existing CentOS-4 programs ... and not
> everything will be changed.
> 
> Hopefully, the answer to your question is in there somewhere :)

oh ... and my specific version numbers given for centosplus and talk of
firefox was related to CentOS-4 and not CentOS-3 or CentOS-2 :)
(though, if you remove the specific version numbers, then conceptually
the rest applies to any version of CentOS)
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