Well correction that was one of the original goals of LTS (Long term support Linux) which was the name of one of the two efforts which were combine to create SL. Since then TUV a.k.a Red Hat has changed their lifecycle policy and made it much longer that it had been prior to RHEL 4 
I'm sure though if Red Hat decided to go back to a two or three year life cycle then SL's policy would change back to providing security patches over a longer period of time.

-- Sent from my HP Pre3

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On Jan 9, 2014 18:39, Ian Murray <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

On 09/01/14 23:13, Paul Robert Marino wrote:

SL is an exact match to RHEL with only a few variations such as the removed the client for Red Hats support site integration and added a few things like AFS because their labs need it. The differences are well documented in the release notes and its a short list.
In addition SL guarantees long term patch availability even if Red Hat is no longer supporting that release.

This wasn't my understanding. According to this page https://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions ...
" * We plan on following the TUV Life Cycle. Provided TUV continues to make the source rpms publicly available."
... which disagrees with your statement. At least the way I read it.

CentOS tends to do thing like update the PHP libraries to make it easier for web developers. And as a result they take longer for many security patches because they occasionally hit dependency issues due to the packages they have updated.

I am pretty sure the base release does not do this kind of thing by default. It would be a major deviation from being "binary compatible" with upstream vendor, which is how I recall their stated goal to be. It may be optional, however.

-- Sent from my HP Pre3

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On Jan 9, 2014 13:17, Orion Poplawski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

On 01/09/2014 05:54 AM, Adrian Sevcenco wrote:.
> What technical differences would be between CentOS + scientific repo and SL?
>
> Just a personal thought, but maybe this would free some human resources
> for maintaining a lot of scientific (and IT/grid related) packages in
> well established repos (like epel, fedora/rpmfusion)
>
> Thanks!
> Adrian
>

Well, for me the main difference between CentOS and SL is that with SL you can
stay on EL point releases. That would require a major change in the CentOS
infrastructure to support it. Worth exploring though...


--
Orion Poplawski
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NWRA, Boulder/CoRA Office FAX: 303-415-9702
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