[bbanyc]

It's been this way forever, though - when I started woody was "stable" but obsolete the day it was released. Since "stable" and "testing" are aliases of branch names, changing them would break scripts all over the place. You move to Debian, you have to learn to speak the language.

Though the truly baffling bit of Debianese is "contrib" which means "this is free software but depends on non-free software." I can kinda see how it came to mean that, but it's very non-intuitive.