Red Hat has announced a change in the preparation process for interim releases of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. Starting with version RHEL 9.5, packages for future interim updates will be released earlier using a continuous publishing cycle, without being tied to a release. A complete release will be accompanied by an update to documentation, installation media, and virtual machine images.
The process for forming beta versions of the distribution will also change; these were previously released about a month before the next interim release. Instead of separate beta releases for RHEL interim updates, starting with version 9.5, the distribution will move to the practice of publishing beta versions of packages as they become ready. Given the 6-month development cycle of RHEL interim releases, the first beta versions of packages will start appearing 4 months before the release. Additional beta updates will be published weekly.
Beta package versions will continue to be hosted in separate repositories 'rhel-9-for--baseos-beta-rpms' and 'rhel-9-for--appstream-beta-rpms'. Installation media for beta versions will no longer be published, but users will be able to generate an installation build or image for a virtual machine using the Red Hat Image Builder tools if desired.
For significant branches, such as RHEL 10 and 11, beta versions will continue to be published about 6 months before the release. The development of CentOS Stream and the RHEL 8 branch will also continue as before. These changes are due to the fact that 6 months is sufficient for familiarization, issue detection, and bug reporting when testing significant versions, while 1 month is too short to thoroughly test updates for interim versions and identify issues within them.
Source: opennet.ru
