[ale] CentOS versions increase but package versions kept the same?

[Jeff Hubbs]

  This isn't a problem in the Gentoo-land in which I dwell but in 
CentOS, how do people deal with a situation where an app implementation 
depends on specific versions of some number of packages - say, five 
packages at the versions included with 4.6 but one wants to keep those 
same five packages at those same versions but in CentOS 5.5?

Is this CentOS "crazy talk?"  In Gentoo's Portage, you'd just tell 
Portage where to hold those packages' versions and you could just go 
blithely updating other packages in your otherwise versionless Linux 
system indefinitely.  But it seems to me that if you care anything about 
your application, you'd want to give it a platform refresh every once in 
a while.  What I'm asking about is a platform refresh but not for those 
parts of the platform that matter the most - the app's first layer of 
dependencies.