I am pleased to announce general availability of the rolling builds for CentOS Linux. Todays release includes CentOS Linux 7 iso based install media and the generic cloud images.

CentOS Linux rolling builds are point in time snapshot media rebuild from original release time, to include all updates pushed to mirror.CentOS.org’s repositories. This includes all security, bugfix, enhancement and general updates for CentOS Linux. Machines installed from this media will have all these updates pre-included and will look no different when compared with machines installed with older media that have been yum updated to the same point in time. All rpm/yum repos remain on mirror.CentOS.org with no changes in either layout or content.

We will aim to update and issue for release a new set of these files at the end of every month going forward. Each released filename includes a datestamp and a buildtag to indicate the content included. Files marked as 20141129_02 indicate that it includes all content released to mirror.CentOS.org upto ( and including ) the 29th of Nov
2014 and is the second build of that cycle. While all build’s are made public at buildlogs.CentOS.org/, only those that pass our QA and testing cycles will be marked as released, to be included in buildlogs.CentOS.org/rolling/. We will also do interim builds as needed ( for development and testing purposes ) at different points in time, those builds will not be marked for general release, but will still be avilable publicly.

Since there is a need to test these images, the release will always lag few days behind the datestamp ( and therefore content included )
in the release. My aim is to automate as much of this as possible going forward to reduce this time lag as much as possible, however we might not be able to remove it completely.

With every cycle, we hope to increase the content made available in this rolling format. Immediate next steps include bringing the CentOS
Linux 7 livemedia into the rolling releases followed by CentOS Linux 6
content from the next ( December 2014 ) cycle.

Due to the way the installer works in CentOS-5, and its point in time we have no plans on including CentOS-5 in this cycle at this point.

For the sake of uniformity and communication, the release media will be referenced by the month it reflects, not the month it was released in. Making this release the Nov 2014 Rolling release.

Other content formats like containers and vendor specific images will aim to start with the same cycle as the main CentOS Linux media, but might move to a more frequent build and release cycle if needed. Special Interest Groups ( http://wiki.CentOS.org/SpecialInterestGroup
) wanting to do media and installer releases should also consider using the rolling timelines to sync with.

Finally, I want to highlight that we will always consider doing a rolling release to address major security issues like the recent heartbleed, shellshock and poodle patches.

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