On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, jeffrey d anderson wrote:

> On Friday 13 July 2007 14:50, Connie Sieh wrote:
>> On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, Michael Hannon wrote:
>>> Hi, folks.  I notice that the RPM's for gsl and gsl-devel no longer seem
>>>  to be included in SL 5.0.
>>>
>>> I.e., on a system running SL 4.4 the "Vendor" for the gsl packages is
>>> "Scientific Linux", but on a 5.0 system the "Vendor" is "ATrpms.net".
>>> See the appended.
>>>
>>> I'm perfectly happy to use Axel's repository, but I wonder: why the
>>> change?  It introduces a slight non-uniformity into one of our
>>> procedures.
>>
>> TUV decided to not include gsl.
>>
>> Is the issue of "non-uniformity"  because some of your programs come
>> from ATrpms.net and some from SL ?
>>
>> Since gsl is clearly related to "science" we will research the inclusion
>> of it in the next SL5.
>>
>> -connie
>>
>
> Hi:
>
> If we're on the subject of packages deleted by TUV, but expected by
> scientists, I'd nominate xemacs and mozilla as well.

Many have looked for a xemacs src rpm that is currently supported and I 
think there was not much there.  If someone wants to take xemacs and 
"support the building" of it.  Then we will add it to the release.  The 
"support" would include creating new versions when security issues 
dictate.

Mozilla is not supported by the Mozilla.org anymore.  There is 
seamonkey which is mozilla but with community support.

Firefox/thunderbird should be able to handle the mozilla/seamonkey duties.

The issue with putting in seamonkey is that there are many security 
changes to seamonkey.  There is quite a bit of work keeping it updated.

>
> I've managed to build them for our use here, but it sure would be preferable
> to have them part of the distribution rather than having to hunt down source
> rpms from various Fedora releases and then hack at the spec files.

Yes that is the issue.  Someone would have to hunt down source rpms and 
hack at the spec files.

>
> I realize that the big issue with these "addon" packages is long-term
> maintenance, but the removal of these packages from the distribution is a
> little alarming.  Someone here even mentioned that there was talk of removing

I understand why mozilla/seamonkey is not included.  Firefox/thunderbird 
should cover that space.  Is there something that is not covered by 
Firefox/thunderbird?

> emacs!  Imagine that.
>
>

-Connie Sieh