Redhat – How to keep the RHEL version static (e.g. RHEL 5.1)

One of the reasons you would select CentOS (or RHEL) is for a stable platform. One of the goals of a stable platform, is to not introduce major changes, which is the reason that subversion and apache haven't been updated on CentOS.

On the matter of 3rd party repositories, the only one that I trust binary RPMs from on my production machines is EPEL.

When I need to update something beyond what CentOS provides, I usually start with the source RPMs from Fedora 10; here and here.

You will almost certainly need to update neon and sqlite, and perhaps db4 if you use the Fedora 10 SRPM for subversion.

You can use the lsb_release command on various Linux distributions:

lsb_release -i -r 

This will tell you the Distribution and Version and is a little bit more accurate than accessing files that may or may not have been modified by the admin or a software package. As well as working across multiple distros.

For RHEL, you should use:

cat /etc/redhat-release