De Vliegende Hollander wrote:

> The sentient life form Aragorn posted the following:
>
>> Arthur Hagen wrote:
>>
>>> singsingchow <singsingchow@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> It's 2008 now.
>>>
>>> I'm sure they'll let you know in the GWN (Gentoo Weekly Newsletter)...
>>
>> I'm afraid there hasn't been any GWN anymore since October 15th 2007, nor
>> has the news section of the Gentoo website been updated since. :-/
>
> Worrying that is! Hope not a prelude to 'The End Of Gentoo' ®, this is...

I did indeed find this inactivity worrying, particularly as I'm about to
install a machine worth USD $~20'000/€~16'000 with Gentoo, spread out as
individually customized installations in virtual machines on top of the Xen
hypervisor (including the /dom0/ virtual machine)...

Now I'm aware of the fact that there have been some difficulties at the
Gentoo website late last year regarding the forum and such, but I found it
strange that I suddenly didn't get any weekly newsletters anymore, and that
the website apparently didn't get updated anymore either - /apparently,/
because the documentation section did get updated with an albeit brief
HowTo on /Xen,/ although I'm not excluding the possibility that the /Xen/
HowTo was already there before and that I had previously simply overlooked
its presence. :-/

Additionally, the AMD64 distribution - which is the one I'm interested in -
is still at the 2007.0 release, and thus I would have expected a 2007.1 or
a 2008.0 anytime soon now. I believe that a post elsewhere - it may have
been in this newsgroup or it may have been on some website - suggested that
Daniel Robbins still considers the current 2007.0 to be up to date for
AMD64 - according to the same post, there should already be images of
2007.1 for 32-bit x86 available, but I cannot corroborate this as I haven't
checked - and it may indeed be so, but then again it's been some time since
the GWN spoke of the upcoming new baselayout, which I believe was scheduled
to feature /initng./

Still, the packages for the "stable" repositories all still seem to be
maintained up to a pretty actual level, and the forum does still see its
usual load of GLSA posts. On the other hand however, the Live CD I've
downloaded not too long ago still has an older kernel on it - 2.6.18, I
think - so apparently it's been a while again since they've updated those
images.

It's puzzling, and I wish they'd at least put a message up on their website
to let us know why it's not being updated anymore, or whether we're to
expect a discontinuation of Gentoo as a distribution... :-/

Maybe they're just going the Slackware/Debian way and only release the newer
stuff after it's been out in the field for 5 years already? <grin>
(Slackware still labels the 2.6 kernel generation as
"unstable/testing"... ;-))

--
Aragorn
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)