Chapter 5. The Debian FTP archives

21

5.4 What about  sid ?

sid or unstable is the place where most of the packages are initially uploaded. It will never be

released directly, because packages which are to be released will first have to be included in

testing, in order to be released in stable later on. sid contains packages for both released and

unreleased architectures.

The name  sid  also comes from the  Toy Story  animated motion picture: Sid was the boy

next door who destroyed toys : )

1

5.5 What does the stable directory contain?

  stable/main/: This directory contains the packages which formally constitute the most

recent release of the Debian GNU/Linux system.

These packages all comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (

http://www.

debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

), and are all freely usable and dis 

tributable.

  stable/non free/: This directory contains packages distribution of which is restricted

in a way that requires that distributors take careful account of the specified copyright

requirements.

For example, some packages have licenses which prohibit commercial distribution. Oth 

ers can be redistributed but are in fact shareware and not freeware. The licenses of each

of these packages must be studied, and possibly negotiated, before the packages are in 

cluded in any redistribution (e.g., in a CD ROM).

  stable/contrib/: This directory contains packages which are DFSG free and freely dis 

tributable themselves, but somehow depend on a package that is not freely distributable

and thus available only in the non free section.

1

When the present day sid did not exist, the FTP site organization had one major flaw: there was an assumption

that when an architecture is created in the current unstable, it will be released when that distribution becomes the

new stable. For many architectures that isn't the case, with the result that those directories had to be moved at

release time. This was impractical because the move would chew up lots of bandwidth. The archive administrators

worked around this problem for several years by placing binaries for unreleased architectures in a special directory

called  sid . For those architectures not yet released, the first time they were released there was a link from the

current stable to sid, and from then on they were created inside the unstable tree as normal. This layout was

somewhat confusing to users. With the advent of package pools (see `What's in the

pool

directory?' on page

24

),

binary packages began to be stored in a canonical location in the pool, regardless of the distribution, so releasing

a distribution no longer causes large bandwidth consumption on the mirrors (there is, however, a lot of gradual

bandwidth consumption throughout the development process).