[ale] Red Hat upgrades?

[Lightner, Jeff]

The philosophy between Fedora and RHEL is different.

In Fedora they are doing bleeding edge so you MUST upgrade every 6 months or so or risk running an EOL version that isn't getting any security or bug fixes.  Requiring an upgrade is not a sign of "stability" even if the upgrade is painless.

In RHEL stability and supportability are the main drivers.  People that are putting their large production installs (especially of 3rd party applications/databases) do not want to have to upgrade every few months because that usually requires doing some major testing and or porting to insure what ran on the old stuff runs on the new stuff.   Therefore in RHEL rather than having each subversion go to higher base releases they stick with lower base releases and backport bug and security fixes (and the occasional enhancement) into that base release.   This is why RHEL5 runs BIND 9.3 even though 9.3 is EOL.   The 9.3 run on RHEL5 is actually RedHat's version with several modifications that they put from upstream higher base releases.   This way even if ISC, the maker of BIND, doesn't support 9.3, RedHat does so long as it is their 9.3 package.   So you can upgrade from RHEL5(.0) to 5.6 (or any other 5.x version) without any issues and what you are getting are these modified base releases with additional RHEL versioning on them.   More than once I've had to show that some security CVE that is addressed in a later upstream version of a package is actually also addressed in the RHEL version we're currently running.   This is because most security scanning software looks only at base versions and not the extended versioning provide on RHEL.

You CAN actually put newer kernels and newer base versions of packages on RHEL - it simply won't be supported by RedHat any longer.   Most folks using RHEL are using it specifically because they want a vendor supported version of Linux and one that is shown as supported by whatever 3rd party app or hardware they are using with it.   Sure the app or hardware MIGHT work with other Linux flavors with enough tweaking but the manufacturer/distributor doesn't support it in that other flavor.

If you're rolling your own for everything you can use LFS, Ubuntu, Slackware or whatever but if you're looking for a "stable" system that has "support" you have to use RHEL or Suse and more 3rd party (commercial) apps are supported out of the box on RHEL than on Suse.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of James Sumners
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 1:52 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Red Hat upgrades?

Yes. But every other distro also supports upgrading between major
releases. Red Hat seems to think this is some impossible task, and
would rather subject their users to days of wasted time.

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Wolf Halton <wolf at wolfhalton.info> wrote:
> Red Hat wants their users to update sequentially.  Doesn't every other
> distro do something similar?



-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
 
Proud partner. Susan G. Komen for the Cure.
 
Please consider our environment before printing this e-mail or attachments.
----------------------------------
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail may contain privileged or confidential information and is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of the contents of this information is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this electronic transmission in error, please reply immediately to the sender that you have received the message in error, and delete it. Thank you.
----------------------------------