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Repositories
While some software projects choose to perform their own packaging and distribution, most packages today are created by the distribution vendors and interested third parties. Packages are made available to the users of a distribution in central repositories that may contain many thousands of packages, each specially built and maintained for the distribu- tion.
A distribution may maintain several different repositories for different stages of the soft- ware development life cycle. For example, there will usually be a “testing” repository
that contains packages that have just been built and are intended for use by brave souls who are looking for bugs before they are released for general distribution. A distribution will often have a “development” repository where work-in-progress packages destined for inclusion in the distribution's next major release are kept.
A distribution may also have related third-party repositories. These are often needed to supply software that, for legal reasons such as patents or DRM anti-circumvention issues, cannot be included with the distribution. Perhaps the best known case is that of encrypted DVD support, which is not legal in the United States. The third-party repositories operate in countries where software patents and anti-circumvention laws do not apply. These repositories are usually wholly independent of the distribution they support and to use them, one must know about them and manually include them in the configuration files for the package management system.