Comments on: Developers give existing Gentoo council a mandate

By: Gentoo: New release, “new” leadership « Striving for greatness

Gentoo: New release, “new” leadership « Striving for greatness — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:40:14 +0000

[...] new release and new council for this week’s LWN.net. If you’ve read my earlier blog posts and other posts on Planet Gentoo regarding 2008.0, there won’t be a whole lot of new [...]

By: Donnie Berkholz

Donnie Berkholz — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:45:11 +0000

Yeah, I’m not sure why icedtea isn’t in the main tree. It’s still in the java overlay. Presumably they’re still working on it.

xorg-server 1.4 was complete trash.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:11:00 +0000

ok… but they’re shipping 1.5_pre, and Ubuntu shipped 1.4 in April. xorg-server-1.4 is still not “stable” in Gentoo. OpenJDK/IcedTea isn’t even in Portage, so users have no good Free Java option. Other distros have been shipping Gnome 2.22 for months, and FF3 is incredibly well tested at this point. Compiz was never stabilized in Portage, and the latest unstable is a year behind upstream.

If Portage doesn’t catch up soon, users are going to start jumping ship to distros that are actually up to date. In fact, they already have.

By: Donnie Berkholz

Donnie Berkholz — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:07:06 +0000

Fedora’s also dealing with some fun issues now as a consequence of shipping bleeding-edge software in their stable release — the xorg-server ABI broke between the prerelease they chose to include and the final release.

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:52:34 +0000

Fedora 9 shipped with Firefox 3.0, Gnome 2.22, OpenJDK 6, kernel 2.6.25, and X.org 7.4 / xorg-server-1.5_pre, all in the default install. None of these things are marked stable in Gentoo, and some of them aren’t in Portage at all.

Gentoo used to be the first distro to stabilize new software, and many of us users chose it for this reason. These days, Gentoo is way behind Fedora and Ubuntu.

So what you can do for me is to convince the x86 arch team to stabilize things faster.