Documentation< Previous | Contents | Next >
1.2.1. The Flow of Packages
On the Debian side, the contributors are working every day on updating packages and uploading them to the Debian Unstable distribution. From there, packages migrate to the Debian Testing distribution once the most troublesome bugs have been taken out. The migration process also ensures that no dependencies are broken in Debian Testing. The goal is that Testing is always in a usable (or even releasable!) state.
Debian Testing’s goals align quite well with those of Kali Linux so we picked it as the base. To add the Kali-specific packages in the distribution, we follow a two-step process.
First, we take Debian Testing and force-inject our own Kali packages (located in our kali-dev-only repository) to build the kali-dev repository. This repository will break from time to time: for in- stance, our Kali-specific packages might not be installable until they have been recompiled against newer libraries. In other situations, packages that we have forked might also have to be updated, either to become installable again, or to fix the installability of another package that depends on a newer version of the forked package. In any case, kali-dev is not for end-users.
kali-rolling is the distribution that Kali Linux users are expected to track and is built out of kali-dev in the same way that Debian Testing is built out of Debian Unstable. Packages migrate only when all dependencies can be satisfied in the target distribution.