[CentOS] New administrator and upgrading systems

Wed Oct 21 13:46:05 UTC 2009
Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>

At Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:25:53 -0500 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> Hi there folks.  I've been watching the never ending "CentOS 5.4 OMG
> WHEN?" threads for the last few days / weeks and had a question.  I'm
> pretty new to anything rpm based.  I used Red Hat 9 back in college,
> but that's about it.  Currently, I do have a few Cent OS servers and
> we're slowly migrating from Debian to CentOS for various reasons.
> Since 5.3 - 5.4 is going to be my first major upgrade, I had a simple
> question.  WHEN it's actually released, and things are going normal,
> should I just continue doing "yum upgrade" as always and will
> eventually be on 5.4?

Yes.  Generally, doing yum update or yum upgrade will pick up new point
releases as they become available.  *Sometimes* you need to do something
special (the 5.2 to 5.3 update required an upgrade of glibc on its own
before the main update -- this was in the update announcement).

> 
> I seem to recall something with Fedora where you had to install some
> kind of release package, etc (again.. this was back in 2003 - 2004
> time) and was just curious.  Simple google searches tell me "yes!
> just yum upgrade" but I wanted input from you guys, if you don't mind.

Fedora does not have 'point releases'.  One does a 'fresh' re-install
every 6 months to a year (or something like that).  CentOS (like RHEL
itself) has long term support for the major version number (like 7
years), with regular updates (security and bug fixes) and point
upgrades (like every 6 months or so).

> 
> Thanks,
> Jonathan
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>                                                                                      

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