-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Folks: A few of us (KB, Johnny, myself) have begun work on updating the main FAQs on the CentOS wiki. Mainly that means looking over and updating for any changes that have been going on in the last 18 months as the project has expanded to include SIG releases, monthly updates of many new types, new hardware architectures, and so forth. For this first update we've got this from the FAQ: q.15: http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/General#head-6e2c3746ec45ac3142917466760321e8 68f43c0e q.31 http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/General#head-dcca41e9a3d5ac4c6d900a991990fd11 930867d6 The first item is that these questions are repetitive, so I'd like to combine them in to a single answer. Second is that version numbering has expanded, so we need to cover monthly updates and so forth. Circling around on this, we ended up with the following complete rewrite that would replace q.31 and retire q.15 (thereby making q.31 in to q.30.) How does this update sound? If we're close enough, I'll push it to live at the start of next week, and we can always continue iterating on it. The text below is in Moin Moin format; I was going to do a diff between the versions but then we differed so wildly in combining and rewriting that I think a mental diff will work better. A formatted draft is here: http://wiki.centos.org/KarstenWade/GeneralFAQUpdateq31q15 Thanks - Karsten ####################################################################### ## begin == How does CentOS versioning work? == 1. CentOS Linux currently has 3 ''major'' released branches that are active: CentOS-5, CentOS-6, and CentOS-7. 1. CentOS Linux releases ''minor'' (point in time) versions of our major branches. These minor versions are also sometimes called ''point releases''. Two very important things about CentOS Linux branches are: 1. The CentOS Project '''ONLY''' provides updates or other changes for the latest version of each major branch. Thus, if the latest minor version of CentOS-6 is version 6.6 then the CentOS Project only provides updated software for this minor version in the 6 branch. If you are using an older minor version than the latest in a given branch, then you are missing security and bugfix updates. 1. When setting up yum repositories on CentOS Linux you should '''ONLY''' use the single digit for the active branch, which corresponds to the CentOS Linux major branch. For example, http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/ , http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/ , or http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/ . This is because we move all older minor branches to http://vault.centos.org/ . Remember from the prior bullet point, no updates are ever added to minor versions of CentOS Linux once in the vault. 1. Since minor versions of CentOS are ''point in time'' releases of a major branch, starting with CentOS-7, we are now using a date code in our minor versions. So you will see CentOS-7 (1406) or CentOS-7 (1503) as a version. This is so that one can know, from the release, when it happened. In the above examples, the minor versions 1406 means June 2014 and 1503 means March 2015. In older major branches of CentOS, such as CentOS-6, we numbered things differently. Those branches are numbered as 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, etc. 1. You might be wondering why the change with CentOS-7. 1. We are trying to make sure people understand they can NOT use older minor versions and still be secure. Therefore, a date in the minor version allows users to know with a glance when this minor version was created. If it is older than many months, there is likely a new version you should look for. 1. As organizations move from individual servers having individual functionality to virtual machine farms and cloud / container implementations, the CentOS Project is now producing VM, cloud, and container images as well as installer ISOs. These images have dates in their name by design. We want users to easily be able to know what major branch and minor release are in these images, again at a glance. If your CentOS-7 images have 1504 (April 2015) or 20150402 (April 2nd, 2015) in the name then they are based on the latest release that comes before this date ... in this case CentOS-7 (1503). 1. You can see which source code from Red Hat Enterprise Linux was used to create each minor version of CentOS Linux from the chart entitled "Archived Versions" from http://wiki.centos.org/Download ## end ####################################################################### - -- Karsten 'quaid' Wade .^\ CentOS Doer of Stuff http://TheOpenSourceWay.org \ http://community.redhat.com @quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC) \v' gpg: AD0E0C41 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAlVx3MYACgkQ2ZIOBq0ODEFnVQCeL26bn92k1b4uGyZ0Ir07RDiy QBcAoLfiIlveRdZejnyEC7iN4txpZaqT =dM81 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ CentOS-docs mailing list CentOS-docs@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-docs
