I work on a large compute cluster used by hundreds of university researchers. Our scientific applications stack is managed via RPM. I would like to provide users with a Julia build that: (1) Includes Julia base (2) Provides some commonly-used secondary packages - the main ones that I have in mind right now are the plotting packages Gadfly and PyPlot and perhaps also IJulia. But there may be others down the line. I want to provide these centrally because many, many users will want to use them and I want to lower the barrier to entry. I also would like to figure out the matplotlib dependencies in PyPlot for them so that they don't have to.
The idea is to provide a base install that will be enough for many users (at least to get started); they can then use Pkg to add any other packages that they require. Is there a recommended method for centrally-installing packages like in (2) while also allowing users to maintain additional packages in their Home directories? I have not been able to track down documentation for this.
