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Comment by devicenull | Hacker News Reader

The "lag" you speak of actually can be thought of as a feature. For example, you don't want doing a 'yum upgrade' to upgrade PHP from 5.2 to 5.3 and break software you are running. You want your core operating system to actually be fairly stable, and not have to worry about upgrades randomly breaking things.

When it comes down to it, you really don't need the latest and greatest software on a server. Aside from security fixes, there's very little reason to upgrade software on a server just because a new version was released.

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A 9 month lag behind RHEL is a feature? You are either misunderstanding something or just trolling.

> When it comes down to it, you really don't need the latest and greatest software on a server.

It is really great when others tell me what I need to run on my server.

Just to be clear, you do know that CentOS is a binary compatible compilation of RHEL? The distro is not about adding feature or improvements or spinning their own from scratch. There is no need to wait for it to become "fairly stable" it just tracks RHEL. If RHEL is unstable, then CentOS is going to be unstable. That is the point of it. Claiming that their lag was on purpose is a little dishonest I think.

Are you saying that RHEL break PHP by upgrading from 5.2 to 5.3?

That would be very strange, RHEL's reknowned for very strict binary compatibility and backporting every security fix to whatever they shipped originally. Lagging behind RHEL updates would normally just mean you're insecure / have bugs for longer.

No, he's saying that upgrading PHP 5.2 to 5.3 might break the PHP apps running on the server.

OK, but unless you have evidence that Red Hat have specifically broken their release policy that won't happen in the middle of a major release, so that's no reason to lag behind on updates.

You realize that CentOS is based on RHEL which is already extremely stable and conservative in updates? Even if new CentOS was released on the same day that RHEL, it wouldn't be 'the latest and greatest software'. CentOS lagging RHEL doesn't add anything of value.

The lag is indeed not a feature, its due to the fact that Red Hat is an organisation with people whom are salaried, compared to the people who work on CentOS that do so for free.

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