• Comments
  • Package upgrades in RHEL minor releases not being documented

    Posted on

    Hi,

    I've noticed that between RHEL minor releases, packages are sometimes upgraded to new major upstream versions (as opposed to upstream maintenance releases / updates). However, these upgrades are not always being documented in either the technical notes or the release notes.

    For example, xorg-x11-xserver (X.org Server) has been upgraded 3 times in RHEL 6.x minor releases:
    1.7 (6.0) -> 1.10 (6.2) -> 1.13 (6.5) -> 1.15 (6.6)

    While I greatly appreciate new hardware enablement and new features in X.org Server, I would expect to see these major version upgrades reflected in either the release notes or the technical notes.

    The 1.10 upgrade was documented:
    https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.2_Release_Notes/graphics.html

    But the 1.13 upgrade was not. It might be implied from the Release Notes that it was upgraded:
    https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.5_Release_Notes/bh-chap-desktop_and_graphics.html
    https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.5_Technical_Notes/xorg-x11-server.html

    And there is no sign of the 1.15 upgrade in the documentation:
    https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.6_Release_Notes/bh-chap-desktop_and_graphics.html
    https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/6.6_Technical_Notes/index.html

    My interest in this is two-fold.
    1. In my free time, I contribute to the X2Go project, which is maintaining a fork of X.org called nx-libs. If a Linux distro is upgrading the X.org server, we want to know about it, because applications may assume that the linux distro's users have a much newer version of X.org server than nx-libs is based on.
    2. At work, we may migrate to RHEL. When a package is upgraded to a new major version, we would presumably want to do extra regression testing of our code that uses that package.

    Thanks,
    -Mike

    by

    points

    Responses

    Red Hat
    © 2025 Red Hat, Inc.