On 11/01/2012 05:25 AM, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
You want to be able to a specific adaptation/configuration of
libvirt-1.0.0 on RHEL6/CentOS6 but not insist that their dnsmasq be
updated.
Yes, there are people that do that. In other words, we like for libvirt
to work out of the box on systems as old as RHEL 5.
Doing some looking, it appears that RHEL6.3 uses libvirt-0.8.7 and
CentOS6.3 uses libvirt-0.9.10. I can see some group wanting to remain
on there particular vintage of RHEL or CentOS and to want the latest
libvirt at the same time. OK, but why not require some other packages
(such as dnsmasq) be updated also.
Because people that compile upstream libvirt out of the box don't
necessarily want to have to maintain all packages in their system, just
libvirt.
Are these same folks contemplating putting a newer kernel such as
kernel-3.6.3-1.fc17.x86_64 also?
Probably not - they want to update just libvirt (since it has a promise
of back-compat), and as little else as possible.
I thought the whole idea with RHEL and CentOS was stability and
"guaranteed" long term (5 years) support. If you want to run the latest
and greatest, then RHEL and CentOS are not the answer for you.
If you self-build libvirt on RHEL, then yes, you are no longer supported
by Red Hat. But people do it. CentOS is already in unsupported
territory, so there, it is already more common to mix and match CentOS
for its packaging plus a few of your own packages for the features you want.
And yes, if you want support, and you use RHEL, then wait for the next
RHEL release (6.4 should be coming along soon now...), and take
advantage of your support contract to ask Red Hat for the features you need.
--
Eric Blake eblake(a)redhat.com +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library
http://libvirt.org