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This is a read-only archived version of wiki.centos.org

How does CentOS versioning work?

  1. CentOS Linux currently has 3 major released branches that are active: CentOS-5, CentOS-6, and CentOS-7.

  2. CentOS Linux releases minor (point in time) versions of our major branches. Two very important things about CentOS Linux branches are:

    1. The CentOS Project provides updates or other changes ONLY for the latest version of each major branch. Thus, if the latest minor version of CentOS-6 is version 6.6 then the CentOS Project only provides updated software for this minor version in the 6 branch. If you are using an older minor version than the latest in a given branch, then you are missing security and bugfix updates.

      • <!> Note: Any minor version is just a snapshot with previous updates, plus the latest batch of new upstream updates, rolled into a new [base] repo with an initially empty [updates] repo.

      • {i} Tip: There is a CentOS Vault containing older CentOS trees. This vault is a picture of the older tree when it was removed from the main tree, and does not receive updates. It should only be used for reference.

    2. When setting up yum repositories on CentOS Linux you should ONLY use the single digit for the active branch, which corresponds to the CentOS Linux major branch. For example, http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/ , http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/ , or http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/ . This is because we move all older minor branches to http://vault.centos.org/ . Remember from the prior bullet point, no updates are ever added to minor versions of CentOS Linux once in the vault.

  3. Since minor versions of CentOS are point in time releases of a major branch, starting with CentOS-7, we are now using a date code in our minor versions. So you will see CentOS-7 (1406) or CentOS-7 (1503) as a version. This way anyone can know, from the release, when it happened. In the above examples, the minor versions 1406 means June 2014 and 1503 means March 2015. In older major branches of CentOS, such as CentOS-6, we numbered things differently. Those branches are numbered as 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, etc.

    1. You might be wondering why the change with CentOS-7.

      1. We are trying to make sure people understand they can NOT use older minor versions and still be secure. Therefore, a date in the minor version allows users to know with a glance when this minor version was created. If it is older than many months, there is likely a new version you should look for.

      2. As organizations move from individual servers having individual functionality to virtual machine farms and cloud / container implementations, the CentOS Project is now producing VM, cloud, and container images as well as installer ISOs. These images have dates in their name by design. We want users to easily be able to know what major branch and minor release are in these images, again at a glance. If your CentOS-7 images have 1505 (May 2015) or 20150501 (May 1st, 2015) in the name then they are based on the latest minor release that comes before this date ... in this case CentOS-7 (1503).

  4. You can see which source code from Red Hat Enterprise Linux was used to create each minor version of CentOS Linux from the chart entitled "Archived Versions" from http://wiki.centos.org/Download

2023-09-11 07:22