On Wed, 28 Feb 2007, John Hearns wrote:

> Jaroslaw Polok wrote:

> I had hoped the HPC community  could have a scientifically "branded" distro 
> on which to base technical computing, ie. you might hope that vendors of 
> commercial packages could see the light and certify their packages on SL.

I see very little benifit in having a seperate "branded" distro for that. 
seems like a lot of effort. A "branded" installer which installs baseOS + 
addon repo... now that make sense.

LSB is what we should be asking vendors to certify against and ask Linux 
distros to certify against. Then we have choice.

> Remember the Pine saga. Pine was ditched by all the main distros, yet had a 
> big following in HEP.
> Your point about having an 'extras' repository with HEP specific packages, 
> e.g Cernlibs, pine etc. would take care of that of course.

Oh yes... of course pine was "ditched" because it was illeagal to 
distrubute as I recall (which seems like a good reason to me)... so even a 
seperate repository is no good there. However Alpine (from the same stable 
as pine) is apache licenced so will be in distros:
  http://www.washington.edu/alpine/
  http://packages.debian.org/alpine

Alex Owen