Akemi Yagi wrote: > > While we are still discussing the subject (or are we?), *yet another* > new person posted a question in the forums [1]: > > "I was wondering, is majority of the software in the repositories > outdated or is it something on my side (and how could I fix it)? For > example, the newest version of PHP that I'm being offered is 5.1.6 and > gnome 2.16.0." > > [1] http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=17299&forum=38 > > A link to the "planned" what-is-an-enterprise-class-OS article/FAQ > would have been handy. > Well, I answered that one this time. Perhaps we could use my answer (below) as a starting point/draft for a FAQ entry. Feel free to comment or offer edits as appropriate: CentOS is an Enterprise-class operating system (built from the freely available source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and as such is more about stability and long-term support than cutting edge. Major package versions are retained throughout the life cycle of the product, so when RHEL 5 (and hence CentOS 5) originally shipped with php 5.1.6 you can reasonable expect that php will stay at that version for the 7 year life cycle of the product. This is generally what Enterprise wants and affords developers a stable base on which to develop without fear that bespoke applications will break every time something gets upgraded to the latest and greatest, but ultimately buggy version or the API changes breaking backwards compatibility. So no, you will generally NOT find the very latest versions of various packages included in an Enterprise-class operating system such as CentOS. It's a feature not a deficiency Security fixes are backported into the shipped version. See here for details: http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_backport.html If you absolutely need the very latest versions then CentOS is probably not the right choice for you and you may be better off with a more bleeding edge distro such as Fedora or Ubuntu together with all the disadvantages that those bring. Generally it's extremely hard to combine stability and long term support with the latest and greatest bleeding edge package selection. You make the choice which is more important to you.
