Alex Owen wrote: > > > >> 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 Alex, I was being a bit sloppy in my language. Yes, I'm aware it was a licensing problem. But you have to have sympathy for the IT people at labs who must have got LOTS of pressure against taking away a package researchers have used for years. And yes, as an (ex) high energy physicist I know what sort of fur could fly here.