[NBLUG/talk] php 4 vs. php 5 -- which to use? how to maintain?

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Sat, Mar 11, 2006 at 10:16:23PM -0800, Dave Sisley wrote:
> I'm curious, though:  Is there any reason that CentOS wouldn't some day 
> update php4 with php5, or is that just not done?  Would I need to 
> configure yum to watch out for that?

Well, I haven't really tracked the CentOS project that carefully, but my
understanding is that their primary goal is compatibility with the various
RHEL distributions and that they achieve this by immediately pushing all
RHEL updates into their distribution (via rebuilding from the source RPMs).

One attribute of any "enterprise" distribution should be that updates within
a given version of the overall distribution never break anything; it's
really bad when patching a bunch of computers means suddenly needing to fix
hundreds of systems.  Updating from php4 to php5 would probably break a fair
amount of PHP applications.  The normal way RHEL handles security fixes and
bugfixes is by making (or backporting) patches for the version of the
package they originally distributed.  The only exceptions I've noticed are
firefox, thunderbird and gaim.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder and Scribe
The North Bay Linux Users Group -- http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at fn AIM: falschfreiheit