On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 17:17 +0100, Chris Jones wrote:
> >
> > I'm not disagreeing with you about Scientific Linux, which I haven't used,
> > but CentOS 4 recently had a very large major upgrade from 4.4 to 4.5, which
> > I, as a new CentOS user hoping for the non-upgrade kind of stability, found
> > rather upsetting. I was told that CentOS just follows RedHat, which had
> > just done that to RHEL 4. Is Scientific Linux different?
>
> Sure, Scientific Linux has various different majors versions that are
> currently SL3 and SL4 (SL5 on the way). These are based on EL3 and EL4
> and very different beasts. You won't find yourself going from SL3 to SL4
> via yum, unless you choose to try and do that.
>
> For sure though SL also has sub-point releases, 3.x and 4.x (currently I
> am on a 4.5 release), which I think are the equivalents of what you talk
> about above. These updates I believe can occur through yum. However,
> I've not aware of any problems in this, its always been pretty flawless.
> I'm not the sys-admin though, but I never heard him complain (and I
> suspect I would have) or noticed any problems as a user.
>
> maybe SL is better than centos in this regard ?
I don't know, but I doubt it. Both distros are intended to track RHEL
pretty much exactly. The upgrade to a new point release usually
involves just installing a rather large number of bugfix updates to
existing packages.
I recall some discussion from Red Hat of possibly retaining old point
releases and issuing only security updates for them so that users
wouldn't have to do the point release thing if they didn't want to.
That is, one could maintain a RHEL 4.2 system and still get security
updates even though RHEL 4.5 is current. I don't know where that stands
at this point, though.
>
> Chris
>
>
--
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
