Debian's policies also led to a heavily restricted version of RetroArch being available instead of the real version. Specifically, RetroArch has its own package management functionality built-in through its "Core Updater" feature, which downloads and installs emulators in the form of library files. This is banned by Debian because it sidesteps the whole package manager system.

Meanwhile, you can still build the full version of RetroArch from source code by installing the dependencies of Debian's source package, but building the original source code instead.