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What is the versioning/release scheme of CentOS and how does it compare to the upstream vendor? [General CentOS Questions]

Requested and Answered by Johnny Hughes [hughesjr] on 03-Jul-2005 23:55 (140292 reads)

What is the versioning/release scheme of CentOS and how does it compare to the upstream vendor?

The upstream vendor has released 3 versions of enterprise linux that CentOS rebuilds the freely available SRPMS for (see About CentOS for the details).

So, the major CentOS releases are CentOS 2, CentOS 3, and CentOS 4.

The upstream vendor releases security updates as required by circumstances. CentOS releases rebuilds of security updates as soon as possible. Usually within 24 hours (our stated goal is with 72 hours, but we are usually much faster).

The upstream vendor also releases numbered update sets for Version 3 and Version 4 of their product (Currently EL 3 update 5 and EL 4 update 1) 2 to 4 times per year. There are new ISOs from the upstream vendor provided for these update sets. Update sets will be completed as soon as possible after the vendor releases their version ... generally within 2 weeks.

CentOS follows these conventions as well, so CentOS 3.3 correlates with EL 3 update 3 and CentOS 3.5 correlates with EL 3 update 5, Centos 4.1 correlates to EL 4 update 1, etc.

One thing some people have problems understanding is that if you have any CentOS-3 product and update it, you will be updated to the latest CentOS-3.x version.

The same is true for CentOS-4. If you update any CentOS-4 product, you will be updated to the latest CentOS-4.x version.

This is exactly the same behavior as the upstream product. Let's assume that the latest EL3 product is update 5. If you install the upstream original EL3 CDs (the ones before any update set) and upgrade via their up2date, you will have latest update set installed (EL3 update 5 in our example).

Since all updates within a major release (CentOS 2, CentOS 3, CentOS 4) always upgrade to the latest version when updates are performed (thus mimicing upstream behavior), only the latest version is maintained in each main tree on the CentOS mirrors.

There is a CentOS Vault containing old CentOS trees. This vault is a picture of the older tree when it was removed from the main tree, and does not receive updates. It should only be used for reference.

There are seperate FAQ entries for update lifetimes for CentOS-2, CentOS-3, and CentOS-4.

3 Comment(s)

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Poster	Thread
riaanvn	Posted: 2007/9/27 8:51 Updated: 2007/9/27 8:52
Newbie Joined: 2007/9/27 From: Posts: 1	Upstream vendor adopting version naming convention identical to CentOS Since mid-2006, PNAELV have adopted a versioning convention identical to that of CentOS. No assumptions are being made as to whether or not the CentOS version naming convention (or that of any other clone) had any influence on this change. The current (as of September 2007) versions of PNAELV EL are v5.0, v4.5 and v3.9. v5.1 and v4.6 are currently in Beta. See this Red Hat Knowledge Base article for more information about the new version naming convention: http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_80_10667.shtm <rant> I am not sure if it is totally verboten to mention ahR aitcH Eh eL by name, but I am taking no chances here and taking the example from the original poster.) I have added similar content to the CentOS Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#Versioning_scheme), without being concerned about getting "cease and desist"-ed. Not being able to provide a link to the PNAELV Knowledge Base article would be a shame, since it contains some good information. I searched on google for "kbase.redhat.com site:centos.org" and found other links to the RHKB, so I am at least as guilty as the rest of us. </rant>

Poster	Thread
strobert	Posted: 2008/7/11 1:43 Updated: 2008/7/11 1:43
Newbie Joined: 2008/7/11 From: Posts: 1	Are there any docs for how to get a syetms with updates available? I've checked FAQs and other docs with regards to this and most of them pointed here, but I didn't see anything here, so figured I should ask. The release version directories look like this (using the current snapshot with 5.2 out as an example) 5.0 -- just 5.0 and updates pre 5.1 frozen and removed from the main tree 5.1 -- update 5.1 baseline plus updates from when 5.1 came out until 5.2 came out 5.2 -- update 5.2 baseline and updates since then 5 -- basically a symlink to 5.2 (actually a directory with symlinks to the subdirs of 5.2 which is a changed from 3&4 which were direct symlinks) So how does one keep a system up to date? I am quite familiar with yum (have local repositores and all of that fun stuff). but say I installed off of 5.1. my yum repos file points at 5.1. So it will never see updates beyond when 5.2 came out. I changed updates to point at 5, but that leads to a different issue. The updates in 5.2/updates are not valid on a 5.1 system as new packages got added in 5.2. for example yum needs phyton-iniparser. Now I suppose one could change to 5.2 and then 5.3...5.4...5.5 etc...as they come out but that doesn't seem right. with the upstream version (from the PNAELV) their updates gets everything new. it would be really nice if there was a single consistent location one could point at that always had all available RPM updates in it.