On 2018-02-22, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote: > > again, some fairly trivial(?) questions about working with centos > 7.4, given my time immersed in fedora so i want to make sure i'm not > carrying over any bad habits. > > first, is there anything untoward in updating an installed version > of centos 7.4 with a simple "yum update"? i'm well aware of keeping > in mind the goal of stability with centos, so am unsure what the > philosophy is of pulling in new updates as cavalierly as i do with > fedora. currently, "yum list updates" shows me 206 possible updates; > should i have any concern about updating packages coming from the > standard centos repos? No. The updates provided over an x.y series are relatively minor and generally well tested. It's very different to the version churn associated with Fedora. The updates also include important security fixes, and it's not advisable to try to apply those in isolation. But I would add the usual caveat: if you're doing anything business-critical with your installation, test the upgrade on comparable hardware first. > > next, are there any issues replacing yum wihth dnf? i found this > piece: > > https://www.vultr.com/docs/use-dnf-to-manage-software-packages-on-centos-7 > > which suggests it shouldn't be a problem. thoughts? Being from the EPEL repository, dnf is not supported by CentOS. So I would avoid using it on a machine which serves a critical function. > finally, any concerns i should have about upgrading the kernel from > 3.10 to 4.14 or 4.15, as explained in a number of places like this: > > https://www.tecmint.com/install-upgrade-kernel-version-in-centos-7/ > > i simply prefer to run a current kernel but i can resist the > temptation if upgrading that on a centos 7.4 system would introduce > more problems than are worth it. > > thoughts? Again, EL Repo packages are not supported by CentOS. Therefore the above warnings apply here too. If, on the other hand, you can afford to tinker with the system and experiment a bit, then go for it. Oh, and welcome to the CentOS community. > > rday -- Liam