<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2008/12/25 Pat Regan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:thehead@patshead.com">thehead@patshead.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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Testing updates before you apply them is quite often a very necessary<br>
step. I can't speak for RHEL/CentOS, but Debian and Ubuntu both have a<br>
security fix only repository. It easier to keep up with testing those<br>
updates than it is testing full system updates.<br>
<br></blockquote><div> </div></div>RHEL/CentOS updates are security and bug fixes only. Once a release is installed, it doesn't change anything unless it must to fix a problem. Enhancements are not part of the process (That's for Fedora!). Code that will require library changes is not allowed. If an upstream security/bug patch requires a lib change, RedHat will back port the patch to run without the lib change. Thus while the current <a href="http://kernel.org">kernel.org</a> kernel is 2.6.28 (Thanks the present Linus!), security fixes are back ported to the 2.6.x kernel for RHEL4/5 and 2.4.x for RHEL3. This same process goes on for core libs and other packages in the release. Thus a custom app for RHEL5 will run for the entire life of RHEL5 regardless the changes to the system for the entire 7 years unless the app relied on one of the problems that gets fixed (it has happened!).<br>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>-- <br>James P. Kinney III <br><br>