[CentOS] Is this right? -- Centos 6 and RHEL 6 infrastrure for continuous update/upgrade

[Johnny Hughes]

On 02/08/2013 07:45 PM, Gelen James wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Both RHEL 6 and CentOS 6 can be installed from any minor releases DVDs: 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, etc. And then got continuous upgrade/update with command 'yum -y upgrade' if repos are setup correct.
>
> But the repos infrastructure is different between the two. CentOS uses two repos:
>
>     ..../centos/6/os/... repo and .../centos/6/updates/...
>
> The updates/ repo contains ONLY updated RPMs between minor releases. currently the updates/ contains updates after 6.3. and the /centos/6/os/ points to 6.3Base.
>
> Question #1: 
>
>
> supposed I installed with Centos 6.2 last year, and let's say Centos 6.4 comes out two months later and I have not updated a single package since initial installation until Centos 6.4 comes out (I am way too lazy :) ), then How can I setup my yum config to not miss any updated packages?
>
> Should I put all three repos inside yum config?
>
>         centos-6.2-kickstart-os
>         centos-6-os
>         centos-6-updates
>     
>   or the centos-6.2-kickstart-os is not needed at all -- the centos-6-os and cnetos-6-updates together contains all latest RPMS since 6.0 -- ? The first way may render yum to report warning of 'duplicate RPM group definitions' or similar.
>
>
> Questions #2:
>
>
> I've heard that RHEL 6 uses a different path, they seems to have only one big continuously updated base os/ repository. all the RPMs updated since 6.0 (include RPMs at the published day of RHEL 6.0) are contained in the repo. So only the one repo is in need to upgrade systems at any time. Is this true? and if so, any benefits go with it?

There is no difference in the 2 approaches if you want the latest
updated version of the OS.  You just need to use centos-6-os and
centos-6-updates.  If you install from a CentOS-6.0 iso and run yum
upgrade, you will have all the latest set of updated RPMs.

The one difference in having everything in one BIG repo is that you
would have access to every single version, not just the latest version,
of RPMS in that one repo.  If you needed an older version of a
particular package, it is fairly easy to do in that scenario.

The negative is that it would be much larger than only the latest RPMS. 

Our vault.centos.org servers (were all the old releases are available if
you actually need older RPMS for some reason), is 663GB.  The
mirror.centos.org trees are only 130GB.  Since we push CentOS to more
than 520 mirrors in 75 countries all over the world, we need to split
out the latest trees (130GB) and make that available to millions of
users. Vault (663GB) requires much more storage, but user demand is also
much less for the older releases.

Remember, Red Hat is a billion dollar company and CentOS runs our
infrastructure completely on donated servers ... the fact that we can
serve millions of users 130GB of data for free is nothing short of
amazing ... but many of our machines do not have the capacity to serve
all 663 GB of data.  But we do also provide vault.centos.org for users
who actually need all 663GB of data.

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