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The concept of reference installations reminds me of Ubuntu main versus universe, or the main RHEL repository versus Fedora's EPEL repo. Makes sense to me. Perh
by mwcampbell 14y ago
The concept of reference installations reminds me of Ubuntu main versus universe, or the main RHEL repository versus Fedora's EPEL repo. Makes sense to me. Perhaps Debian should use separate repositories too, so the difference is highly visible when we browse packages.
- e12e 14y agoWell, technically, there is already "contrib". I guess it is a little crazy to have as many packages in "main" as there is. Impressive, yes, but also a little crazy :-)
- e12e 14y agoNow that backports is part of Debian, I think most of the issues with "out of date" packages are much less painful than they used to be. I suppose factoring main into "core" and "non-core", would make maintaining backports easier too - you could then test building a package against a smaller set of core packages and libs. Packages needing newer versions of glibc, automake/autoconf, gcc/clang/ruby/python/perl etc are still tricky though.
- grn 14y agoCurrently contrib is used for packages that have compile-time or runtime dependencies on packages outside of the distribution (e.g. with dependencies in non-free).