BIND Upgrade

[Sara]

I have BIND 9.2.1 running on my system (linux Redhat 7.3). I urgently
need to upgrade to the latest version (9.2.4? BTW: what's the meaning
of "candidate release"? Is it a synonyn of "stable release"? Is this
terminology somewhere documented?)
I did not use RPMs. I downloaded the tar.gz file from ISC site and
compiled it.
I do not remember the options I set (except for the prefix option). 
Can someone detail a procedure to seamlessly upgrade BIND in a
production environment?
Thank you

Sara