In a lot of cases, for example perl, Xorg, and gcc, the Gentoo distribution lags far behind the latest available releases. Even allowing the "~amd64" unstable series, this remains true. Why is this so?
I had first considered moving to Gentoo in the fall of 2008, but after noticing that the only version of gcc available at that time was gcc-3.x, I postponed the change. In the spring of 2009, Gentoo finally moved up to gcc-4.3.x and then I made the transition. But the update to the 4.3 series was a long time in coming. The latest perl, released some time ago, is version 5.10 but Gentoo includes only 5.8.8. The latest Xorg has restructured certain libxcb dependencies, which has caused a lot of problems for a lot of packages, and Gentoo is behind these changes as well. (Ironically, it was this libxcb issue as well as the whole Xorg modularity mess that first motivated me to seek out Gentoo.) Now I am not actually voicing a complaint. Gentoo, IMO, is still the best distribution for Linux. I am just wondering why there is such a great lag before a package version is deemed stable -- or even unstable. In my experience with maintaining my own Linux system, I never had any great issues with always installing the latest "bleeding" edge software. Frank Peters
