On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 11:12 -0500, Olivier Fisette wrote:
> - They would like to coordinate the publication of their Gentoo Linux 2007.1 
> magazine edition with the release of Gentoo 2007.1. Ideally, the articles 
> would need to be ready three weeks before our release. However, it would also 

...not gonna happen.  For one, we don't *ever* have our release done 3
weeks before we ship it.  We pretty much release it the second it's
completed.

> I am interested in helping out (writing, translating, reviewing articles), and 
> would appreciate if the PR-team was involved. Also, those interested in 
> contributing would need to be informed of the planned release date to set up 
> deadlines for articles. Since December is around the corner, I also wonder if 
> there will be a 2007.1 at all. Without any release plan information 
> available, I am reluctant to commit myself further.

There is no plan.  There are no dates.  Any dates we ever give out are
completely guesses and fairly arbitrary.  We have not _ever_ met our
dates, published or not.  I really wish people would understand that the
only date that can be accurate is the initial snapshot.  Beyond that, it
is 100% up to the state of the tree and the number of security bugs that
arise during the release cycle.  We're currently modifying the snapshot
due to the extremely large number of security bugs we've been getting.
As such, our snapshot is becoming quite stale compared to the tree.
We're working as hard as we can to get things done as fast as we can,
but we're unfortunately at the mercy of teh Intarnets and UPSTREAM.  Our
current plans are to release as soon as we have something.  However, if
that timeframe slips much more, we are likely dropping the release
entirely.  This is because I am not going to have my guys slaving away
through the holidays and with the original snapshot being taken on
October 19th, a new snapshot would need to be made.  In other words,
we'd have to start over.  If we're starting over, we'd just wait a
couple months and start on 2008.0, instead.

I hope this helps give you an idea of the pressures we're under and
sheds some light on our inability to provide hard dates.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation