2.1.11.
Historical notes about Sid
Up one level
-
When the present-day Sid did not exist, the Debian archive site organization
had one major flaw: there was an assumption that when an architecture was
created in the current unstable/, it would be released when that
distribution became the new stable. For many architectures that
wasn'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. When an architecture was released the first time there was a
link from the current stable/ to sid/, and from then
on they were created inside the unstable/ tree as usual. This
layout was somewhat confusing to users.
With the advent of package pools (see The pool
directory, Section 2.1.10) during the Woody distribution development,
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).
