CentOS - Jul 2005 - CentOS newbie question - updates

Pardon the newbie question, but I thought I'd check with you guys here since
I couldn't find the answer to this one on CentOS web site.

I installed CentOS 3.4 (needed an equivalent of RHEL 3.4 for a very specific 
purpose - not interested in newer releases at this point) and downloaded all 
available up2date stuff.  However, Apache is at v2.0.46, php is at 4.3.4, 
and so on - which are all quite old versions.  I was under the impression 
that Red Hat rolls updates into existing versions and what may show as 
Apache 2.0.46, may indeed include updates and patches that are available in 
the most current release, 2.0.54.....  Is this the case here, with CentOS, 
or should I be looking somewhere for actual rpms for Apache, php, and so on, 
to bring them up to 'latest' standards?  If so - where??  up2date
doesn't
seem to be loading anything more current than what I mentioned above.

If current patches are rolled into old versions, how does one distinguish 
between the "old" Apache 2.0.46 and "new/patched" 2.0.46??

Thanks,

Chris

On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 10:17:20PM -0700, Chris (CentOS list)
wrote:
> I installed CentOS 3.4 (needed an equivalent of RHEL 3.4 for a very 
> specific purpose - not interested in newer releases at this point) and 
> downloaded all available up2date stuff.  However, Apache is at v2.0.46, php
> is at 4.3.4, and so on - which are all quite old versions.  I was under the
> impression that Red Hat rolls updates into existing versions and what may 
> show as Apache 2.0.46, may indeed include updates and patches that are 
> available in the most current release, 2.0.54.....  Is this the case here, 
> with CentOS, or should I be looking somewhere for actual rpms for Apache, 
> php, and so on, to bring them up to 'latest' standards?  If so -
where??
> up2date doesn't seem to be loading anything more current than what I 
> mentioned above.
> 
Security fixes are back-ported, but not new features.
> If current patches are rolled into old versions, how does one distinguish 
> between the "old" Apache 2.0.46 and "new/patched"
2.0.46??
>
The RPM version number and the changelogs/patches in the SRPMS.


-- 
Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened

On Thu, 2005-06-30 at 22:17 -0700, Chris (CentOS list)
wrote:
> Pardon the newbie question, but I thought I'd check with you guys here
since
> I couldn't find the answer to this one on CentOS web site.
> 
> I installed CentOS 3.4 (needed an equivalent of RHEL 3.4 for a very
specific
> purpose - not interested in newer releases at this point) and downloaded
all
> available up2date stuff.  However, Apache is at v2.0.46, php is at 4.3.4, 
> and so on - which are all quite old versions.  I was under the impression 
> that Red Hat rolls updates into existing versions and what may show as 
> Apache 2.0.46, may indeed include updates and patches that are available in
> the most current release, 2.0.54.....  Is this the case here, with CentOS, 
> or should I be looking somewhere for actual rpms for Apache, php, and so
on,
> to bring them up to 'latest' standards?  If so - where??  up2date
doesn't
> seem to be loading anything more current than what I mentioned above.
> 
> If current patches are rolled into old versions, how does one distinguish 
> between the "old" Apache 2.0.46 and "new/patched"
2.0.46??
> 
Chris,

RHEL is about stability and not the latest version.  They don't roll in
all aspects of the new versions ... just the new security updates.

Once a major item is in RHEL, they won't roll in changes that cause
things not to work.

So, some things (for example firefox, mozilla) will get upgraded totally
as time goes on.  Other things like KDE, OpenOffice.org, Gnome, Apache,
PHP, MySQL, etc. are probably not going to move to newer major version.
These will just get any security issues and bugs fixed.

See the RH backporting policy:
http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_backport.html

All the security issues will be fixed ... other things, maybe not.
-------------------------
So, you basically need to decide between the two concepts.  Do you want
the latest and greatest versions or do you want stability with
backporting?

If you want latest and greatest (and not just security updates with
backporting), then RHEL (and therefore CentOS, since we use the same
sources to build our updates) is probably not going to meet your needs.
cAos or Fedora (if you like RH like OSes); Debian testing or Ubuntu (if
you like .deb); or Gentoo are likely better choices if you want to
continually get newer technology fast.

CentOS will be OK if you want to make those changes on an 18 month cycle
and not a 6 month cycle though.  As new RHEL versions come out (and they
will have newer products in RHEL 5 and RHEL 6, etc.) ... the versions of
everything will go up then.

CentOS can be slightly newer than RHEL in the centosplus repository:

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/centosplus/

So, there will be some things there (like PHP5, a kernel with more
features turned on, some extra filesystems, and probably OpenOffice.org
2.0 when it is released).  But, CentOS Plus will not make CentOS be
Fedora, nor will it be like Debian testing.  Everything added will be
able to be used with other existing CentOS-4 programs ... and not
everything will be changed.

Hopefully, the answer to your question is in there somewhere :)
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