Troy Dawson wrote:

> - CentOS doesn't like to let users "sit on a release".  Now this might 
> be changing since RedHat is finally letting users do that.  But that 
> might be a concern that several scientists have.  You know, as well as 
> I, that despite all explanations and reasoning, they don't want 
> *anything* to change (and at the same time must have all the latest 
> bleeding edge stuff).
> This is one point I think we'll have a hard time with when talking to 
> some of the user communities.  We'll have to come up with some 
> reasonable solution.

Perhaps we could do something along the line of
  * mirroring base CentOS,
  * providing SL-style "tweak" RPM's in a separate YUM repository
  * providing site specific separate YUM repositories
  * maintaining selected releases longer than CentOS does

We would only then be re-building RPM's for security updates
on our selected releases for our longer maintenance window;
but we could get out of the business of rebuilding the whole
distribution and share that work with the CentOS folks.