Gentoo has apparently cancelled it’s 2008.1 release, making this the second time in 12 months that a release has been cancelled. Instead of using the usual twice yearly release cycle that most other distributions have, Gentoo developers are opting for a continuous approach.
In place of fixed releases, Gentoo is promoting a live, continuously updating distribution. In practice this emphasises the use of minimal installation images which are then supplemented with updated packages straight from Gentoo servers and mirrors.
“We need to work harder to communicate the relative irrelevance of releases in a live distribution like Gentoo,” Gentoo developer Donnie Berkholz explained to InternetNews.com. Releases “have an overly large impact on what non-Gentoo users think of the health of the distribution, so problems with a small team within Gentoo are magnified in their effect on public opinion.”
Having recently converted my laptop to Gentoo, I can attest that this system seems to work quite nicely. Portage, Gentoo’s package management system, really does the job. Dependencies are resolved correctly at least 99% of the time and updating the entire system is a breeze.
While installing large applications such as OpenOffice or Gnome might take some time (i.e. hours and hours as everything is compiled locally), things do largely work quite nicely once installed.
InternetNews [via Tectonic]
