[CentOS] CentOS 6 updating policy
John Hinton
webmaster at ew3d.com
Fri Nov 4 13:48:57 UTC 2011
On 11/4/2011 9:24 AM, David McGiven wrote:
> I am migrating from debian to RHEL (CentOS) and I am wondering how the
> CentOS 6 updating system works.
>
>
> Suppose I install CentOS 6.1 now. Suppose in 8 months CentOS 6.2 is
> released.
yum update will pull in the new version and install it and update your
release from 6.1 to 6.2. (if there were a 6.1... it might get skipped
and 6.0 will update to 6.2)
>
>
> Now I issue a yum update, so my system will be updated to CentOS 6.2, or I
> will have an updated 6.1 ?
It will be 6.2
>
>
> What if I have been issuing yum update very day just to be sure there are
> no packages with urgent security bugs ? I am having a very updated 6.1 or
> an almost 6.2 ? Or are they the same thing ? I think that during this time
> I should be using Continous Release repository, right ?
Yes, CR is optional but to me important.
>
>
> Also, which is the policy regarding new versions of software, kernel and
> libs ? The bugfixes will be backported or there will be major differences
> between, let’s say, 6.1 and 6.4 ?
Security issues are almost always backported. Almost always on a CentOS
major release, anything installed such as website scripts will work
throughout the entire 7 year cycle of minor releases. This is the main
beauty of CentOS, and also the main drawback. Sometimes clients want
something newer... for instance PHP 5.3. It was not available via
upstream until the release of 6 and the last minor release of 5
(although that was to me a sad attempt). So, there will be some gripes
at times, but since you haven't broken their stuff during the major
release cycle... what is better? And, you can always customize a system,
but often times reliability will suffer somewhere along the line.
>
>
> I couldn’t find all of these question properly answered in the FAQs
Basically it is just really easy and happens during yum update. Minor
releases are times when the largest changes are made, but again, rarely
do they actually break anything. I think I still have enough fingers on
my hands to count the issues over the last 15 or so years when something
client side broke in a server environment.
Non-upstream repositories... not so much. But in fairness, some of these
repositories provide packages that make core changes, like an entirely
new conf file and one must go fix these. Upstream seems to operate under
never forcing a replacement conf file... In other words, the service
will generally continue to operate without admin intervention.
John Hinton
>
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> David
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John Hinton
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