On 12/14/2011 02:51 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 01:34:50PM -0800, Yasha Karant wrote:
>> A partial list that I have found includes ElRepo.org, PUIAS, ATrpms, RPMforge.net,
>> Extra Packages for Enterprise/EPEL, and of course SL 6 itself ...
>
> Please add "SLC 6", the CERN flavour of SL. Contains many additional packages,
> some only useful at CERN, others generally useful, but avialable
> only to users inside CERN.
>
If SLC 6 only is available to users inside CERN (presumably anyone with 
a CERN account that can use the repository through a connection -- 
possibly a VLAN tunnel -- to onsite CERN) but not to those of us who are 
not inside CERN -- it seems to me that the repository is of little use 
except to those at CERN.

I do repost my question:  how does one compare the various repositories?

Note that EPEL states:

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (or EPEL) is a Fedora Special 
Interest Group that creates, maintains, and manages a high quality set 
of additional packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited 
to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL).

EPEL packages are usually based on their Fedora counterparts and will 
never conflict with or replace packages in the base Enterprise Linux 
distributions. EPEL uses much of the same infrastructure as Fedora, 
including buildsystem, bugzilla instance, updates manager, mirror 
manager and more.

End quote.  Thus, EPEL claims that EPEL packages will never conflict 
with or replace packages in the base Enterprise Linux distributions. 
If this claim is factual, then one presumably can mix EPEL and SL 
packages (for the same release and architecture) without concern.  I am 
attempting to discover if this sort of a claim is true for any other of 
the public repositories.

Yasha Karant