I think you are right in that they are both the same thing. They are both talking about how you don't have to run bin/cvsreport.pl. I think they end up as two separate things because before, dw-nonfree and dw-free both had to be synced; now dw-free is the base directory and dw-nonfree is in the ext directory, automatically overrides things in dw-free, and neither need syncing.

I'll try to figure out some alternative wording.