[CentOS] Upgrade path from CentOS 7 to future versions

Wed May 11 15:38:19 UTC 2016
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

Warren Young wrote:
> On May 10, 2016, at 4:12 PM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu>
> wrote:
>> On Tue, May 10, 2016 3:57 pm, Liam O'Toole wrote:
>>> On 2016-05-10, Valeri Galtsev
>>> <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>>>>
<snip>
>> Yes, LTS, thanks Liam. Only LTS has life cycle of mere 2 years, whereas
>> RHEL (hence CentOS) is what, 10 years?
<snip>
> And in fact, more than two.  This isn’t just about RHEL vs Debian and
> derivatives of same.  Several major non-Linux OSes also manage to do
> automatic upgrades between major releases: Windows, OS X, FreeBSD...

I was under the impression that all the releases of OS X were more like
what we call subreleases (6.6->6.7). But I don't know, and don't really
care - I don't do WinDoze, I don't do (or like) Macs.
<snip>
> Your point about the 10 year support cycle for RHEL is also invalid.  The
> time spacing between major releases is only about every 3 years, and that
> is the period that matters here.

No, it's not invalid, nor is it what matters. For example, here at work,
we have clusters, and a small supercomputer, all running 6.x (in the case
of the supercomputer, it's an SGI-modified RHEL 6.x), and they'll go to 7
probably when they're surplused replaced.

Or take me, personally, at home - I dislike systemd, and have zero
intention of going up until I have to, and that won't come for a good
number of years yet, when support for 6.x stops. And, btw, no, you cannot
tell me I'm "wrong" to dislike it, that I should "Embrace Change!!!",
because a) I don't need anyone's opinion to justify how I feel about how I
deal with something, and b) just because you *can* do something doesn't
mean you *should*. For one example, I do *not* embrace change in the form
of, say, Web-enabled thermostats (and they do security updates exactly
*when*?, or Web-connected cars (are you out of your friggin' alleged
mind?). So, why should I go to something NEW! SHINY! when what I have
works well, and is comfortable?
<MVNCH>
And automatic upgrades are *NOT* always a Good Idea. For example, just
last year, EPEL just upgraded the torque packages that we use to run our
clusters... from 2.5 to 4.2(?!?!?!), which broke the test cluster
instantly, and took a lot of research and work to make work on the test
system by the admin I work with, and on our two big clusters, we're not
upgrading - our users would be down for a while... and these are several
folks running jobs on the (24, 25) node clusters whose jobs can run a week
or two straight.

       mark, down in the trenches, not in a hosting environment