I have an N810 on OS2008 version 5.2008.43-7 and I'm a little confused about the "distribution" field for extras (and other repos). I think it was originally blank. I know that when you do enter a distribution with 'free' and 'non-free' as the components, the system will look at the following files:
to find the available packages, but what exactly happens when you don't enter a distribution for a catalog, what Packages file does it use? Does the software guess your distribution? And if so, what distribution would my device be using, 'diablo'?

I thought diablo was the latest distribution for OS2008, but all my repositories either have no distribution listed, or have 'chinook'. I checked the actual extras repository out and I found that mistral, scirocco, gregale, bora, and chinook all have flite:
But not diablo:
I don't understand why the most recent distribution would not have a piece of software that all previous distributions had. I also don't understand why all my repos are set to 'chinook' and not 'diablo'. I switched the distribution of the extras repo to 'chinook' and now the device is telling me that there are a whole bunch of updates available. Why does setting my device to the previous distribution give me more recent software?

No one has any ideas or information for me?

Software doesn't guess the distribution. It knows that it's diablo and it looks for diablo.

flite isn't there for diablo because nobody has put it there.

If you want to stay as far as possible from problems do not use chinook repositories, you have seen that there might be some problems using them.

That's exactly what I meant by 'guess', the software can tell what distribution you're running and selects the proper repository.

Okay, well whose job is it to put it there? Doesn't anyone else care that flite, and many other pieces of sofware, aren't available for diablo, but are for earlier distributions?

I don't see how that's possible when, as I stated, some of the repositories that came with the n810, or were automatically added, used chinook. Also, I have not "seen that there might be some problems using chinook". I was presented with updates to my software when I changed one of the repos to chinook, which seems like an improvement over using diablo. I just don't know if that's the accepted thing to do. Is that what everyone else is doing (using chinook repos when they're on diablo)?

Also, can anyone tell me why the chinook repos are more up-to-date and have more software than diablo?

It's nobodys job. Somebody has completely voluntarely uploaded the software for earlier distributions, but nobody has been interested updating it for diablo.

Chinook repositories didn't come with N810. There may be some not so good .install files around which add chinook extras repository.

I would say that seeing that update notice is a problem, because the versions aren't newer if you look closely. Diablo is compatible with chinook, but just to keep things clean it's better to use only diablo repository.

chinook repository is not more up-to-date. There may be more packages simply because it's been there longer and some packages have never been uploaded to diablo. But chinook repository is a bit more messy because it was maybe little too easy to upload stuff there (without buildable source, which is partly why some packages are missing from diablo).