* On 2014-07-11 at 12:58 BST, James M. Pulver wrote:

> 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. ..

Hi James,

For me it was easy enough to provide these packages, as we already do
bulk builds for a number of other operating systems.  We provide
CentOS 6.5 in our cloud, so it was very little effort to set up.

They aren't meant to replace existing repositories, nor meant to be
used instead of continuing to develop EPEL etc.  I'm just offering
them in case they provide packages people need which aren't currently
available in the native repositories.

Whilst there are a lot of obscure packages included, it is also the
primary package manager for a number of operating systems, and so
there is by necessity a lot of up-to-date software provided too.

If it turns out that there is too much overlap and there isn't any
benefit, that's fine.  I just thought I'd offer them up and see what
interest there is, and can then decide if it's worth continuing.

Regards,

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