To look at the other side of the coin, take into account that this is RHEL: the "E" stands for "Enterprise", and part of what you are paying for is a stable, long-term support cycle. Look at other "Enterprise" operating systems (HP-UX, Solaris, AIX) - they have a 2-5 year release cycle (often just for minor releases!)... RHEL is no different.
If you want the latest and greatest, use Fedora or some other cutting/bleeding edge distro... or else build the components yourself, which is what you'd do with any of the other enterprise Oses. Most shops I know of are still use RHEL4, anyway :) Kevin -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chris Adams Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 3:46 PM To: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga) discussion mailing-list Subject: Re: [rhelv5-list] Whither RHEL6? Once upon a time, Jack Neely <[email protected]> said: > I must say that I'm fairly concerned about RHEL 5 being "current" for > much longer. Its pretty long in the tooth in general at this point. Yeah, that is a problem. A 3+ year release cycle for open source software is just not cutting it. I'd like to see a more up-to-date RHEL cycle, maybe something like: 6.0: base release 6.0.1: update 1, 3-6 months after base release 6.0.2: update 2, 3-6 months after update 1 ... 6.1: semi-major update, 1 year after base release 6.1.1: update 1, 3-6 months after 6.1 release ... Just doing "yum update" would stay within a 6.x release tree; you'd need to take an additional step to move to 6.(x+1) (preferably still able to upgrade via yum though). Basically, turn the current .y update releases into .x.y point releases, and then do "semi-major" updates on an approximately annual basis. What I'm calling "semi-major" would be version upgrades in things like PHP, MySQL, etc., but still be in an "upgrade-in-place" release (since RHEL major release upgrade-in-place upgrades are unsupported). Don't upgrade to a newer kernel or installer version, since those are big deals, tend to be the source of upgrade-in-place issues, etc. RHEL will continue to fall behind the curve if it stays with a 2-3 year major release cycle with no supported upgrade-in-place capability. -- Chris Adams <[email protected]> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
