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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 :-)

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Now that backports is part of Debian, I think most of the issues with "out of date" packages are much less painful than they used to be.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