On Saturday 10 May 2008, davecode@(protected):
> Hi,
>
> We plan to eval Gentoo. We await 2008 final. The comment is, Gentoo
> home page gives no clue about status. Convincing people that Gentoo
> is "alive" becomes tricky because the final is months late and little
> motion on the home page. That's about all most people inspect.

I think you misunderstand how Gentoo works.

First of all, there's no such thing as "the latest Gentoo version". What
you do have is the current state of the portage tree and that is
constantly changing.

All that "2008" is, is a workable snapshot of a basic system that you
use to install Gentoo. The next thing you do is update the tree to the
latest state, and update the system by recompiling everything that has
changed since your CD image was built.

There's only one reason to wait for the 2008 CD, and that is if you have
hardware that cannot boot from existing installers due to driver
issues. So this is a bootstrap problem, not a latest version problem.
For example, this very notebook I'm using now is 7 months old, and I
used a 2005 installer CD to install - it just happened to be the only
one I conveniently had handy at the time.

Gentoo is not Ubuntu, don't try to think of it in Ubuntu terms. Don't
claim that "this confuses new users", because those new users are
mistaken. Shoehorning Gentoo into something where the latest installer
is of vital importance is never going to work and all attempts to do so
will fail, in much the same way that awaiting "linux kernel 2.6 SP9" is
also never going to work out

> So bottom line, impressions of Gentoo are going south even before we
> test.

That's a false assumption. You or your users are looking at a blue sky
and asking why it isn't green with pink dots because those colours are
nice.

Doesn't work that way.

> Some sort of "progress bar" or chart showing bugs squashed and new
> reported, maybe?? At least some kind of "ticker" showing "expected
> final release date"? Counting lines of code or something?
>
> Personally I don't care when final ships - just knowing "present
> expectations" or status with an easy home page glance is all I ask.

OK, so this is what you'd like. Unfortunately you can't get it. What
could be done though is a nice big clear link to an article that
explains how Gentoo works and why OS versioning is not relevant.

Perhaps a chart laying out the latest stale and unstable versions of
major packages, categorized by arch would suit your needs.
Distrowatch's list of packages provided would be a good place to start.


--
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

--
gentoo-user@(protected)