Mathematicians, physicists, astronomers and so on use the TeX in theirs 
works.
So scientificlinux can include usable (Latex) packages in the extra 
repository.

It's much worse to maintain the very old version of TeX, texlive-2007.
Current version is texlive-2012. By the way the repository with modern 
version
of texlive someone can find at
http://jnovy.fedorapeople.org/texlive/packages.el6/

Vladimir Titov


On Sat, 29 Sep 2012, David Sommerseth wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Ben Ruijl" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Sent: Saturday, 29 September, 2012 4:42:49 PM
>> Subject: Include latex pgf package
>> 
>> Currently, there is no package in the repositories for latex pgf
>> (http://www.ctan.org/pkg/pgf). This is the package that includes
>> tikz, the
>> drawing framework for latex.
>> 
>> Could you please add this package?
> 
> I'm not a SL developer, but I don't think this is the right approach.  SL 
> will probably not ship much extra packages unless really needed to provide a 
> stable system.  SL is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (often referred to as 
> TUV - The Upstream Vendor).  So SL tries to stay as close to the package set 
> TUV ships.  SL developers takes TUV packages, strips them for trademarks and 
> other things they're not allowed to provide as-is, then compiles and package 
> them for SL.
> 
> The approach you probably are looking for is to get your packages included in 
> some third party repositories, like Fedora EPEL (Fedora packages for 
> Enterprise Linux), rpmforge, atrpms, elrepo [1] ... It might even be that 
> your needed package is already included in another repo.
> 
> So first step is to figure out if your needed package is already shipped 
> through another channel (do a 'yum search yum-conf' to get a list of third 
> party repos SL provides access to "out-of-the-box").  Then if you can't find 
> it anywhere else, figure out which third party repo is most likely most 
> relevant and willing to ship these packages and suggest this package to that 
> community.  And if you really want to see it happening sooner, becoming a 
> package maintainer yourself and going through the process of getting the 
> package included is really recommended.  That way you contribute to the 
> repository community and also other Enterprise Linux users who might like 
> these packages.
> 
> Otherwise you need to convince TUV to ship this package, which is really 
> going to be harder unless you really can provide convincing arguments why 
> their Enterprise Linux distro needs this package. You would also need to have 
> good arguments why they would spend money on a package maintainer and/or 
> developer supporting this package for all their customers as well.  So going 
> the community way is most likely the easier way, and getting it into Fedora 
> EPEL might cause it to be pulled into a EL release some point later on. 
> Provided TUV got customers also wanting this package.  The package "food 
> chain" in a sentence is basically: Fedora -> RHEL -> SL/CentOS, where only a 
> subset of Fedora packages hits RHEL.
> 
> I hope this helps you to see the bigger picture a bit better.

> 
> kind regards,
> 
> David Sommerseth
> 
> 
> 
> [1] A small and incomplete EL repository overview: 
> <http://www.scientificlinux.org/community/repo>
>