not to be rude but back to the core of the original question: is is safe to assume that future releases of Centos will remain a "built from publicly available open source SRPMS provided by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policies and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork).", AND all additional non-PNAELV packages will remain in the extra repository??? The whole point of the question is to make sure that Centos will remain 100% binary compatible with PNAELV, at least in terms of package version. This does not mean that others will not have the ability to break this 100% binary compatibility, at least in tersm of package version, by installing more "up-to-date" packages from "extra repositories". By "extra repository(ies)" I mean any other repository that contains packages which are not in PNAELV. thanks bn