On Feb 7, 2012, at 8:07 AM, Ross Walker wrote: > On Feb 7, 2012, at 7:58 AM, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote: > >> The purpose for having enterprise software is so that you can get a >> return on your investment and use your code for 7 years (for CentOS >> versions before CentOS-4 ... now 10 years in post CentOS-5). But >> keeping things for that period of time means that when you do need to >> upgrade, the "differences" are much harder and the changes are usually >> much bigger for a given package. > > For this reason it is often better to upgrade more frequently then every 7-10 years. Personally I have a 5 year max lifetime for my systems. Even then upgrades are painful and we try to stagger these so they all aren't due to upgrade at once. ---- if you think about it, perhaps you are making the case for using a configuration management system like puppet where the configuration details are more or less abstracted from the underlying OS itself. Thus once running (and I'm not suggesting that it is a simple task), migrating servers from CentOS 5.x to 6.x or perhaps to Debian or Ubuntu becomes a relatively simple task as the configuration details come from the puppet server. This becomes more evident when you stop looking at a server being a single OS install on a single box and start running virtualized servers. Craig