I just read the Release Engineering document on the front page of gentoo.org and I am very pleased. Everyone involved, I applaud you all - this looks like an excellent process to add to Gentoo and it looks to be incorporating many of the things I've enjoyed from the FreeBSD project.
In the past, devs have bulked at making actual version releases, saying that people should just emerge sync and they'll be at the latest 1.4 or what have you. Maybe they were afraid of falling into the pit of molasses that Debian seems to be perpetually trapped in. The scheme of 4 mandatory releases per year looks like an excellent compromise, provided QA is still there. So you'll still have fresh releases with decent QA to boot. A couple things: Versions named by year? Thats always been a pet peeve I had with other programs... is this now set in stone for Gentoo? Are prior versions going to be kept available on rsync mirrors, similar to how one might leave a FreeBSD box cvsup'ing against RELENG_4_8 rather than -CURRENT or -STABLE? Furthermore, if prior versions would be left up on the mirrors, how practical would it be to maybe have the GLSA people backporting the GLSAs? The BSDs do this, but obviously you can't keep it up for ever... the OpenBSD people only do it for the last 2 versions + the current one, don't know where the FreeBSD people draw the line. Again though, Kudos. I'm feeling some renewed enthusiasm for Gentoo stirring in me now. (If this was already discussed in the list, forgive my lameness because I missed it) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
