NYCPHP Meetup

[Michael B Allen]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 1:02 PM, Daniel Convissor
<danielc at analysisandsolutions.com> wrote:
>> I am dissatisfied with CentOS' conservatism -- I guess it's not for me --
>> but installing another distro based on a hunch that it might help seems like
>> overkill, doesn't it?
>
> Yeah, there are many Linux distros that really suck at updating packages.

Your analysis is faulty. CentOS (or really Red Hat since CentOS is
mostly just re-branded RHEL) not "updating" packages is quite
deliberate.

Once the major.minor version of a package is selected, it does not
change for the life of that OS' major.minor version (and for many
things only the major version - ie. the kernel). The reason is that
the API provided by the package can change if the minor number
changes. So the new package could cause all sorts of strange things to
happen if it's linked with or used by other packages.

And in fact, the internal PHP API has changed with 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2.
So if you install a third party extension for PHP 5.1 and then upgrade
to PHP 5.2, the extension will no longer load.

> You can always compile PHP yourself.

And then re-compile it for every patch level release?

Mike

-- 
Michael B Allen
PHP Active Directory SPNEGO SSO
http://www.ioplex.com/