On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 7:28 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nka...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 5:59 AM, Tom H <tomh0...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 4:13 PM, Orion Poplawski <or...@cora.nwra.com> wrote: >>> >>> The ultimate cause of this issue was an upgrade of glib2 by RedHat in RHEL >>> 7.1. And because the glib2 library does not use symbol versioning, rpm >>> cannot >>> automatically add the proper requires/provides to avoid installing >>> incompatible libraries. So, this has nothing to do with EPEL, per se, but >>> just normal issues that can occur with any update to RHEL. >> >> Rex Dieter (who's a Fedora and EPEL developer; it's too bad that the >> RH bugzilla instance doesn't add a "dev" icon to developers' names >> like the Gentoo one) explains in comments 5 and 7 why they don't do >> this. They don't need to because sticking to a specific point release >> is an SL quirk that's not supported by RHEL. So a RHEL user wouldn't >> hit this qtwebkit/glib problem and EPEL's developers don't waste their >> time ensuring that's it works. > > What? No, SL and CentOS *inherit* this behavior from Red Hat's minor > point releases. Our favorite upstream vendor has moved away from the > old practice, long before RHEL, of the point releases being supported > individually long term, but they certainly publish new installation > media with the new point releases. The big difference is that SL and > CentOS continue to publish the point releases in different web > accessible directories, so you can still see the point releases and > updates segregated by time, and releases they were compatible with. > RHEL publishes all the updates since the first point release in a > giant pool, more like the SL 6x and 7x repositories: it can provide > some really useful information about the point releases to compare > thei contents among them.
I agree with your last point. RHEL and CentOS use the equivalent of SL's 6x/7x by default and don't give the option of using 6.y/7.z. Point releases are just a snapshot of the packages at a certain point in time, like Debian 6.x/7.x and Ubuntu 12.04.x/14.04.x. RHEL offers its customers an EUS program for them to remain at a point release and get security updates but it doesn't publish the EUS sources in the same way that it doesn't publish the ELS sources.