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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. Perhaps Debian should use separate repositories too, so the difference is highly visible when we browse packages.

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Well, 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 :-)

Now that backports is part of Debian, I think most of the issues with "out of date" packages are much less painful than they used to be.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.

Currently 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).

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