On Fri, 25 May 2012, Stefan Lasiewski wrote:

I have a question regarding the various RPM repos for the SL6.

Some of the repos have a major.minor version number:

ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6.0/
ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6.1/
ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6.2/

And then there are repos for the '6' and '6x' releases:

ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6/
ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6x/

The subdirectories of //ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6/ just point to //ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6x/ .  This was just to make it easy to find "6" .

and a repo named '6rolling':

ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/

My questions:

- What are the differences between these different kinds of repos?
- When should I be tracking the '6' repository vs the 6.2 repository vs.
the '6rolling' repository?

6x is a symbolic link that points to the "current" release of 6. This is so you always "find" the current release.  We also provide a "yum-conf" which which "points" to 6x.  When a new "point" release is made all the systems with their yum-confs "pointing" to 6x will be updated to this newer version.  Note the "non yum-conf 6x" will keep the system at that point release.

We will update the faq.  This is a very good question for it.