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1.5.3. A Curated Collection of Applications
Debian aims to be the universal operating system and puts very few limits on what gets packaged, provided that each package has a maintainer.
By way of contrast, Kali Linux does not package every penetration testing tool available. Instead, we aim to provide only the best freely-licensed tools covering most tasks that a penetration tester might want to perform.
Kali developers working as penetration testers drive the selection process and we leverage their experience and expertise to make enlightened choices. In some cases this is a matter of fact, but there are other, more difficult choices that simply come down to personal preference.
Here are some of the points considered when a new application gets evaluated:
• The usefulness of the application in a penetration testing context
• The unique functionality of the application’s features
• The application’s license
• The application’s resource requirements
Maintaining an updated and useful penetration testing tool repository is a challenging task. We welcome tool suggestions within a dedicated category (New Tool Requests) in the Kali Bug Tracker16. New tool requests are best received when the submission is well-presented, including an explana- tion of why the tool is useful, how it compares to other similar applications, and so on.