The question I'm asking is... "Why?" ... What does this get me that EPEL etc don't? Are these especially obscure packages? I mean, "zip" is in SL repo. "xpdf" is in  EPEL... Wordnet is in SL repo etc. ..

--
James Pulver
CLASSE Computer Group
Cornell University


-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Perkin
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2014 4:42 AM
To: Elias Persson
Cc: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Fwd: New binary package set for EL6 x86_64

* On 2014-07-11 at 09:02 BST, Elias Persson wrote:

> On 2014-07-10 19:53, Yasha Karant wrote:
> >I received the following email message that does not appear to be 
> >posted to the SL list.
> 
> It's on the list:
> http://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1407&L=scientific-linux-
> users&T=0&P=15184
> 
> The weird way it was sent (via another list?) and the fact that the SL 
> lists lack list-id and such probably cause any filter you might have 
> to miss it though.

Sorry, my fault.  I subscribed to a few different lists which I thought would be interested in this, and then sent one mail which bcc'd them - assuming that the list servers in question would handle the rest.

Again, if you have any questions about this package set, I'd be delighted to answer them.  I've had a few come in so far, so I'll take the chance to summarise them here:

 - You can browse the list of packages here:

     http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/packages/Linux/el6/2014Q2/x86_64/All/

 - They aren't in RPM format, but pkgsrc (the system used to build
   them) does have pluggable backend support, and there was an
   unfinished GSOC project to implement RPM support a few years back.
   If someone is interested it would be fantastic to see this finished
   so we can provide them as RPMs via yum instead.

 - pkgsrc is branched every 3 months, and from that we generate the
   binary packages and provide a new package set, so every quarter
   there is a fresh update of new packages.

Cheers,

--
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com