Gentoo Formulates New Release Strategy

In future releases, Gentoo will focus on a more back-to-basics approach that will give you up-to-date install media on a regular basis and make much better use of our human resources. The Gentoo team is looking into automated weekly builds of the minimal CDs and stage tarballs as well as maybe an annual LiveCD release. Gentoo will provide updates as they decide on the details of this new approach.

Gentoo is a free operating system based on Linux that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme configurability, performance and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.

On its website, Gentoo stated that they are canceling the 2008.1 release. "The release engineering team has to reconsider its priorities—we overstretched our human resources during the prolonged 2008.0 release process. This caused too much stress for our release engineers and multiple postponements of the release" the website stated.

You can help! The Gentoo release engineering team is looking for new volunteers because it perpetually has a severe lack of manpower. The Gentoo team is particularly looking for people with a good grasp of ebuild development and the ability to debug/fix problems that crop up during building and testing of the stage tarballs and ISO images.  More information can be found about the staffing needs along with updates can be found on the release engineering team web page.

The concensus in the Gentoo forums is that Gentoo is on the right track with this approach.