Redundant Packages in Auxiliary Repositories

Hi, I noticed that several packages (e.g., the KDEmultimedia3-* group of packages) have been made available in the Packman repository at the same version and build number as those that are included in the base SuSE distribution. I'm curious about why these non-new packages were posted? Do they differ in some way from those in the stock distribution? By the way, I'm not talking about packages built for, say, i686, where the stock distribution targets x586, but cases where there is no apparent difference between the Packman package and the SuSE one (other than the distinctive ".pm.#" tag in the package name, that is). Randall Schulz