On Monday, September 19, 2011 09:09:45 PM you wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 11:36 AM, Connie Sieh <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> > It is not unsupported.  You will get security updates but will not get the
> > new features for each of the new point releases.
...
> In my opeinion and experience, it's a support rathole and contributes
> to developers and admins having to maintain their own, personal sets
> of drivers and binaries and libraries and destablilizing the whole
> mess. It certainly occurred with the upgrade from 5.5 and 5.6, I was
> able to throw away entire sets of poorly integrated user-built tools
> and replace them with supportable and better configured system tools
> from the upgrade.

Nico, the way Connie has described is the way SL has run for quite some time now.  They have made it work as best as is possible, and that is part of the way SL has done things.  This is one of the differences between CentOS and SL; SL doesn't just put the older releases back in the vault and not support security updates on them, but actively supports security updates as much as is possible on the back releases.

While I remember the old RHL days, and I remember the version skew in minor versions, I also see that in the EL world things are quite a bit different, and in this case different is good.  Because of the version stability and the backporting policy, upstream can roll a security-only update to a critical package without version skew that breaks things.  At least most of the time upstream can do that; when upstream's upstream makes the security patch to where it is difficult in the extreme to update, then a version bump will occur (like with Firefox, just to use a very visible example).  

Moving through EL5.0 through 5.7 has been almost completely painless (relative to the agony of older RHL minor versions), and I'm sure there are those out there who installed SL5.0 and have only taken critical security updates to 5.0.  This is the way the SL project has chosen to do things.

I remember, as I was the PostgreSQL maintainer at the time, the PostgreSQL major version upgrades during multiple minor version updates of the old RHL.  Major version upgrades to PostgreSQL at that time broke your database completely.  Because of the EL backport efforts, long-term support of multiple PostgreSQL versions has occurred, with security fixes applied across all of the upstream supported versions (upstream here not referring to the PostgreSQL project, but to Red Hat, who employs developers to do this).  

You have chosen to stay with the current feature patches, and that works for you.  There are users of SL for whom that will not work, but they still get security fixes thanks to the work of the SL team, who, once again, have chosen to do things this way, and for whom it makes senser given their userbase.  And this is all enabled by upstream's backporting policy.