I said this briefly on the gentoo-dev list, and I want to expand on it here. The council is Gentoo’s leadership, and it’s composed of 7 people elected by all Gentoo developers using a Condorcet-style ranking vote. Of the 7 people on the old council, 5 of them decided to run again and every single council member who ran was re-elected.
This is significant because the re-election was forced over miscommunication about a meeting, and this created some serious conflicts with a sentence in the Gentoo Linux Enhancement Proposal that created the current structure, including the council. I consider this a mandate, showing that Gentoo developers have confidence in the existing leadership doing what’s best for Gentoo.
This was your chance to say yes or no, and you gave us a resounding yes. Since it isn’t often we hear much from the vast majority of developers, this really means a lot to me in saying which directions we should go, based on who you voted for (graphs here). My interpretation is that you like what’s going on now and where we’re talking about going. I’d really love to hear more input from those of you who don’t normally speak up, though. What can we do for you?
Striving for greatness 
Fedora 9 shipped with Firefox 3.0, Gnome 2.22, OpenJDK 6, kernel 2.6.25, and X.org 7.4 / xorg-server-1.5_pre, all in the default install. None of these things are marked stable in Gentoo, and some of them aren’t in Portage at all.
Gentoo used to be the first distro to stabilize new software, and many of us users chose it for this reason. These days, Gentoo is way behind Fedora and Ubuntu.
So what you can do for me is to convince the x86 arch team to stabilize things faster.
Fedora’s also dealing with some fun issues now as a consequence of shipping bleeding-edge software in their stable release — the xorg-server ABI broke between the prerelease they chose to include and the final release.
ok… but they’re shipping 1.5_pre, and Ubuntu shipped 1.4 in April. xorg-server-1.4 is still not “stable” in Gentoo. OpenJDK/IcedTea isn’t even in Portage, so users have no good Free Java option. Other distros have been shipping Gnome 2.22 for months, and FF3 is incredibly well tested at this point. Compiz was never stabilized in Portage, and the latest unstable is a year behind upstream.
If Portage doesn’t catch up soon, users are going to start jumping ship to distros that are actually up to date. In fact, they already have.
Yeah, I’m not sure why icedtea isn’t in the main tree. It’s still in the java overlay. Presumably they’re still working on it.
xorg-server 1.4 was complete trash.