mailing-lists at hughesjr.com (Johnny Hughes) writes: > I would like to take the time to inform people that CentOS-4.4 will > contain some major changes. The changes are significant enough that I > would like to spell out some of them now, probably at least a month > before the release of the upstream "EL4 update 4" is released. [snip changes] I assume from the comment that you make that these changes WILL be different to the versions expected to be distributed by RedHat? I currently follow CentOS because it's stable and BECAUSE it very closely tracks RedHat's RHEL versions. If you decide that you want to distribute newer versions of certain packages would it not be better to provide them separately (perhaps in "vendor specific" (vendor=CentOS) tree? This means that we can if needed maintain compatibility with RHEL or if needed follow the newer versions in a controlled way. Building mozilla, firefox, thunderbird or openoffice this way ALSO allows standard RHEL users to use the CentOS packages if they so choose thus potentially gaining you more "users" and also allowing CentOS to provide "added value" to RHEL. Distinguishing the rpms could be done by: prefixing a centos-packagename to the rpm name and perhaps prefixing the install path to a more appropriate location which could be sym linked to the vendor location if needed (via the alternatives system?) e.g. Provide packages in the "RH standard configure paths" prefixed by something like "/centos". /centos/bin /lib /libexec /share/.... The required changes to the spec file should be reasonably small and should be consistent between different versions of the packages thus making the appropriate patching less troublesome. rpmdiff[1] is also quite good at showing this. I do appreciate the work being done by the CentOS developers and am sure that others do too, but I think that one of the reasons people follow CentOS is because it is a RHEL clone and expect it to behave as such. Starting to diverge from that premise may not be a good idea. Just a thought. Regards, Simon Mudd [1] http://ftp.wl0.org/rpmdiff/rpmdiff