On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 12:29 +0530, steve wrote: > On 11/07/2009 06:51 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote: > > > > I upgraded from CentOS-5.3 to CentOS-5.4 > > (and earlier from CentOS-5.2 to CentOS-5.3) > > just by running "yum update". > > > > Why can't I upgrade to Fedora-12 like that? > > Is it just that the CentOS makers are cleverer...? > > > While others have pointed out the similarity between upgrading fedora and > upgrading CentOS releases (as opposed to upgrading CentOS point releases), allow > me to defend fedora against the last comment that you made (maybe in jest, but > just the same :)) > > a. The number of packages in Fedora are larger than in CentOS (I don't know > absolute numbers but I'm willing to bet fedora has at least twice the number of > packages as CentOS does). This implies that theoretically fedora has at least > twice the number of possible points of failure during an upgrade -- of course > with good packaging polices this is contained and one barely ever notices the > differences between CentOS and Fedora upgrades. > > b. One of the things Fedora aims for, is to include new technology and innovate > as early as possible. This necessarily implies that some things might change > drastically between releases. However, the effect of this too is contained by > proper packaging policies. > > c. Fedora is what Red Hat decides to base it's RHEL platform upon. RHEL is what > CentOS distributes (after cleaning out the legal hassles to allow them to do so, > for instance Red Hat trademarks). So, basically the 'cleverer' CentOS makers are > building on top of the work of the Fedora makers, /including/ the tests and bugs > coming out of the Fedora community as well as Red Hat's QA team. > > d. RHEL (and so also CentOS) is designed to be run on production systems, so > upgrades (using either yum upgrade or otherwise), undergo more rigorous testing > compared to Fedora (which relies on people like us to test at least the beta > releases and file bugs, if we expect upgrades to just work). > > Hope that clarifies a few things about the cleverness of the Fedora 'community'. :) ---- actually, I think this doesn't do much for clarifying things. RHEL (and CentOS since it is essentially a repackage of RHEL) is designed to be long term releases...approximately 8 years with the first 5 years being updates and the last 3 being security updates. The 'point' releases of RHEL (and CentOS) are mostly implementations for newer hardware but the commitment is to maintain ABI throughout the release to prevent breakage of currently running configurations. The kernel on an RHEL release is consistent throughout the release (i.e. RHEL or CentOS 4 is 2.6.9-X and RHEL 5 is 2.6.18-X). The updates are largely incremental. Fedora can have vast changes of kernels, glibc and ABI from release to release and is intended to be the development edge for Linux rather than the stable release philosophy of RHEL. They are vastly different philosophies. Thus there isn't any particular cleverness of either RHEL (or CentOS) vs. Fedora but rather they are by intent serving different functions. If you want a stable server that requires less maintenance and less overwhelming upgrades, RHEL (or CentOS) are clearly a better choice. If you want the latest features, i.e. typically usage on users desktops, Fedora provides that. For example, RHEL 5 (and CentOS 5) still use openoffice.org 2.3.x where Fedora uses openoffice.org 3.1.x. Craig -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
