CentOS - Mar 2012 - Centos long end of life support, but im interested in packages themselves.

Hi Guys

Im hoping someone would be so kind to answer my question.

Where I work we are currently reviewing and making use of Centos, because of its
long end of life support.

CentOS-6 updates until November 30, 2020

The question I would like to ask is.
Say Centos 6 offers and makes use of PHP 5.3. Say as time goes on PHP themselves
deprecate 5.3 and EOL is reached.
Would Centos 6 continue to offer security and bug fixes support for PHP 5.3 till
November 30, 2020?

If someone could help me understand this, it would be appreciated.

Kindest Regards
Brent Clark

On 03/23/12 12:16 AM, Brent Clark wrote:
> The question I would like to ask is.
> Say Centos 6 offers and makes use of PHP 5.3. Say as time goes on PHP
themselves deprecate 5.3 and EOL is reached.
> Would Centos 6 continue to offer security and bug fixes support for PHP 5.3
till November 30, 2020?
>
> If someone could help me understand this, it would be appreciated.
centos builds and releases whatever RHEL does.  so you really should be 
asking, will Red Hat continue to support php 5.3 after the PHP project 
has EOLd it.



-- 
john r pierce                            N 37, W 122
santa cruz ca                         mid-left coast

On 23 March 2012 07:16, Brent Clark <brentgclarklist at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi Guys
>
> Im hoping someone would be so kind to answer my question.
>
> Where I work we are currently reviewing and making use of Centos, because
of its long end of life support.
>
> CentOS-6 updates until November 30, 2020
>
> The question I would like to ask is.
> Say Centos 6 offers and makes use of PHP 5.3. Say as time goes on PHP
themselves deprecate 5.3 and EOL is reached.
> Would Centos 6 continue to offer security and bug fixes support for PHP 5.3
till November 30, 2020?
>
> If someone could help me understand this, it would be appreciated.
I think Redhat is going to try and do just that, I see they still
mantain PHP 5.1 in EL5... Then again who knows what tomorrow will
bring.

On 03/23/2012 12:16 AM, Brent Clark wrote:
> Would Centos 6 continue to offer security and bug fixes support for PHP 5.3
till November 30, 2020?

       Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future;-)

Hello Brent,

On Fri, 2012-03-23 at 09:16 +0200, Brent Clark wrote:
> Say Centos 6 offers and makes use of PHP 5.3. Say as time goes on PHP
themselves deprecate 5.3 and EOL is reached.
> Would Centos 6 continue to offer security and bug fixes support for PHP 5.3
till November 30, 2020?
Since CentOS is just a rebuild of RHEL these sort of questions are best
asked at Red Hat forums.

That said, as RHEL is an enterprise distribution Red Hat's approach is
to back port fixes to maintain old behaviour (I'm not a representative
but this is my understanding). A clear example of this is the recent
glibc update (https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2012-0393.html) where
they actually patched the code to maintain old behaviour even though
that old behaviour violates standards:

* Calling memcpy with overlapping arguments on certain processors would
generate unexpected results. While such code is a clear violation of
ANSI/ISO standards, this update restores prior memcpy behavior.
(BZ#799259)

Regards,
Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research

On 03/23/2012 02:16 AM, Brent Clark wrote:
> Hi Guys
>
> Im hoping someone would be so kind to answer my question.
>
> Where I work we are currently reviewing and making use of Centos, because
of its long end of life support.
>
> CentOS-6 updates until November 30, 2020
>
> The question I would like to ask is.
> Say Centos 6 offers and makes use of PHP 5.3. Say as time goes on PHP
themselves deprecate 5.3 and EOL is reached.
> Would Centos 6 continue to offer security and bug fixes support for PHP 5.3
till November 30, 2020?
>
> If someone could help me understand this, it would be appreciated.
>
> Kindest Regards
> Brent Clark
The answer to your question is not cut and dry ... and as others have
said, it totally depends on what is done upstream by Red Hat and
released in their Source stream.  CentOS just builds whatever they
release for as long as they release it.  If they extend their lifetimes
and continue to release the code, then we will continue to build and
release it too.

Also, the type of package you are talking about impacts the answer too.

Please see the backporting blurb here:
https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting/

For Server type packages, like in your example php, the answer is that
they almost always maintain the same Major/Minor version and just
backport security fixes.

But, for desktop applications, like OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird,
etc., they will move to newer items.  As an example, CentOS 5.0 had
firefox-1.5.0.9-10.el5.centos.src.rpm ... and now we have
firefox-10.0.3-1.el5.centos.src.rpm.  So some things, necessary for
workstation type installs, will move ahead during the period.  But
server packages will generally maintain ABI/API compatibility (so
basically php-5.3.x and httpd-2.2.x, etc will be maintained the whole time).

Sometimes they will add new things on top of the old ... like when they
added php53-5.3.x as well as php-5.1.9 to CentOS-5.

Hopefully this answers your question.

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