On Wed, Aug 26, 2026 at 06:25:04PM +0200, Madalin Ignisca wrote: > You are providing me now a good advice to take the release notes as > authoritative guide. OK. I understand that, but please than make the > main pages of Debian to help everybody else to understand what is the > source of truth, and what is something else that might contain false > information but still is under the Debian.org/* domain.
The repository information in the Debian Reference is not false. The updates repository (and the security repository, for that matter!) is optional, from a purely technical perspective. That is, nothing in the main repository depends on content from them. Any package in the main repository can be installed with all dependencies satisfied within that repository. This is why you're able to perform an offline installation using only the DVD media. Would it be helpful if the Debian Reference listed stable-updates as "important", as it does for stable-security? We can reassign this to the debian-reference maintainer to make that change, if so. > PS: for end user, if all 3 are mandatory, it does not make sense to be > separated. Probably should be redesigned to offer one single main > channel to install and update a system. Similarly, we can file a wishlist bug against (I believe) ftp.debian.org to request this change. However, for various reasons regarding the process of updating and mirroring the various repositories, I would not expect the change to be implemented any time soon. noah
