On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 7:28 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 5:59 AM, Tom H <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 4:13 PM, Orion Poplawski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>> The ultimate cause of this issue was an upgrade of glib2 by RedHat in RHEL
>>> 7.1. And because the glib2 library does not use symbol versioning, rpm cannot
>>> automatically add the proper requires/provides to avoid installing
>>> incompatible libraries. So, this has nothing to do with EPEL, per se, but
>>> just normal issues that can occur with any update to RHEL.
>>
>> Rex Dieter (who's a Fedora and EPEL developer; it's too bad that the
>> RH bugzilla instance doesn't add a "dev" icon to developers' names
>> like the Gentoo one) explains in comments 5 and 7 why they don't do
>> this. They don't need to because sticking to a specific point release
>> is an SL quirk that's not supported by RHEL. So a RHEL user wouldn't
>> hit this qtwebkit/glib problem and EPEL's developers don't waste their
>> time ensuring that's it works.
>
> What? No, SL and CentOS *inherit* this behavior from Red Hat's minor
> point releases. Our favorite upstream vendor has moved away from the
> old practice, long before RHEL, of the point releases being supported
> individually long term, but they certainly publish new installation
> media with the new point releases. The big difference is that SL and
> CentOS continue to publish the point releases in different web
> accessible directories, so you can still see the point releases and
> updates segregated by time, and releases they were compatible with.
> RHEL publishes all the updates since the first point release in a
> giant pool, more like the SL 6x and 7x repositories: it can provide
> some really useful information about the point releases to compare
> thei contents among them.

I agree with your last point. RHEL and CentOS use the equivalent of
SL's 6x/7x by default and don't give the option of using 6.y/7.z.

Point releases are just a snapshot of the packages at a certain point
in time, like Debian 6.x/7.x and Ubuntu 12.04.x/14.04.x.

RHEL offers its customers an EUS program for them to remain at a point
release and get security updates but it doesn't publish the EUS
sources in the same way that it doesn't publish the ELS sources.