On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 6:22 AM, Lamar Owen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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.
(snip)
> 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.

According to what I heard, SL has been doing it this way since the
very beginning of the SL history. And it was based on users' request.
Red Hat's EUS (extended update support) serves similar purposes but it
was started much later than SL.

Akemi