History¶

Project History¶

The IUS Project started as an internal experiment at Rackspace in 2006.

Rackspace customers would regularly request newer versions of PHP and MySQL. Third party RPM repositories existed that would provide these things, but they were considered unsafe because they would unexpectedly replace other stock packages beyond what was requested (see the SafeRepo Initiative). A better solution was needed. Rackspace employees started building new packages with alternate names from the stock packages. These were special because they would have a virtual provides for the stock package name, in order to satisfy other packages' dependencies. However, because the actual package name was different, upgrading to the new package could never happen unexpectedly. All upgrades were on an individual, opt-in basis. This gave customers the flexibility and control they were looking for.

These RPM package repositories continued as an internal Rackspace offering until 2009. In the spirit of open source, it was decided that these RPM packages should be publicly available so that anyone could benefit. This was the start of the IUS Project as we know it today.

The IUS project is fully sponsored by Rackspace, and the core developers are Rackspace employees. That said, IUS is not a service of Rackspace! IUS packages are not covered by any service level agreements. For more details, please read our End User Agreement.

Notable Removed Packages¶

yum3¶

Older versions of yum in EL5 had issues resolving dependancies that were provided by packages with alternative names. IUS submitted a patch upstream and also created a yum3 package with the fix. The issue was eventually backported to the stock RHEL yum package, which made the yum3 package unnecessary.

openssl10¶

Several years ago, we received a request for an updated version of OpenSSL. When the request first came in, there was an internal debate if IUS should package something so important to the whole operating system like OpenSSL. We decided to package it and had second thoughts about that decision almost immediately. In RHEL 6.5, Red Hat updated OpenSSL to version 1.0.1. Due to the issues with our openssl10 package, we decided to remove it and recommend all users switch back to the stock OpenSSL packages.

LaunchPad¶

When the IUS project first started, LaunchPad was the best location for version control, bugs and mailing lists. Unfortunately, LaunchPad is starting to show its age and thus we switched to GitHub for version control, announcements, and bugs/issues.