RHEL 5 to have new version numbering system

Krishna Kumar

NASHVILLE (Tennessee): Red Hat today announced a new version numbering scheme
for the upcoming version of Red
Hat Enterprise Linux.

Updates to RHEL used to have an update1, update 2, update 3... numbering
scheme so far. With version 5, that is to change to a more industry standard
X.Y.Z numbering scheme. Thus, versions would be numbered 5.1.0, 5.1.1 and so on.
Under this scheme, the Y updates would be the major updates with a six monthly
cycle and Z would be bug fixes to Y.

Details of the subscription scheme are being worked out.

Currently, RHEL 5 is scheduled for an end of 2006 release. Detailing the
Roadmap at the ongoing Red Hat Summit here, Nick Carr and Danile Reik of RHEL
Product management stated that the key feature of the upcoming release is going
to be virtualization, built around Xen, the opensource virtualization project.
In fact, Xen is so critical to the release that release dates could get affected
if Xen schedules get delayed.

The first elements of stateless Linux will also be visible in RHEL with
Release 5. Stateless Linux is about separating the OS and applications from user
and configuration data.

(Red Hat hosted the author at the summit)

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