The timestamps that are included in the Atom feeds are broken, or at least wrong. I would expect the timestamps to reflect the time of the update, so that newer items go to the top of the feed. Instead, the timestamps are all over the map. For example, right now I see this entry in the feed: <entry> <title>dev-ruby/ruby-xslt-0.9.5</title> <link rel="alternate" href="http://packages.gentoo.org/package/dev-ruby/ruby-xslt" type="text/html"/> <id>http://packages.gentoo.org/package/dev-ruby/ruby-xslt</id> <author> <name>Dawid Węgliński (cla)</name> <uri>http://cia.vc/stats/author/cla</uri> </author> <updated>2006-03-29T16:35:56Z</updated> <summary type="xhtml"><div>17 Nov 2007; Dawid Węgliński (<a href="http://cia.vc/stats/author/cla">cla</a>) <a href="http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/dev-ruby/ruby-xslt/ruby-xslt-0.9.3.ebuild?view=markup">ruby-xslt-0.9.3.ebuild</a>:<br/>Stable on x86 (bug #<a href="http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199391">199391</a>)</div></summary> </entry> This entry has the timestamp 2006-03-29T16:35:56Z and consequently is shown by my RSS reader (Liferea) at the bottom of the feed. The timestamp is probably derived from the mtime of ruby-xslt-0.8.1.ebuild, but this is the oldest ebuild, and it is not relevant to the change that is listed here. Simple solution would be to just set the <updated> field to Time.now (or the equivalent in python).
What URL did you use to generate that entry? It should have taken the mtime of the changelog for the feed entry->updated timestamp.
I'm using the new feed URLs, and I think this entry came from the stable amd64 feed. It's fairly easy to reproduce, though. When I look at http://packages.gentoo.org/feed/arch/amd64/stable right now I see the entry for sys-libs/glibc-2.6.1 which has a timestamp of 2007-07-02, for example.
Fixed.
