On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 1:37 PM, Gé Weijers <ge at weijers.org> wrote: > > > On Mon, 13 Dec 2010, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: > >> RHEL is much better about that, although by now the "production" RHEL >> 5 is 4 years out of date, the "leading edge" RHEL 6 is now one year >> out of date after the lengthy release testing, and CentOS will always >> lag that. > > I believe "out of date" is the wrong wording. RHEL/CentOS 5 is maintained, > i.e. security issues and bugs are fixed. There's nothing "out of date" > about a tool that works and is cost-effective. RHEL 6 still has to prove > itself. >From harsh experience, I'm afraid it's the right wording. You can only go so far with "backporting", and critical feature additions (such as the availability of GSSAPI in OpenSSH, warnings of local password storage in Subversion, git emacs macros incompatible with the out of date Emacs, and PHP dependencies unfulfilled for contemporary tools make it quite stale. > In my day job I support dozens of developer desktops that run CentOS 5 with > a modified kernel supporting non-standard devices. It takes a few hours a > week. Trying to track the bleeding edge supporting, say, Ubuntu would take > much more time. Well, yes. But the edge on RHEL 5 is 4 years old,a nd RHEL 6 (end eventually CentOS 6) will have been blunted for a year by the time it's published. It's a problem if you try to backport contemporary tools (which I do).