As reported by a user on irc: 00:00:31 < darkschneider> i did not changed it... time ago it gave me a message saying that my current profile was obsolete and that it will switch automatically to this developer one... since it did alone i did not contraddicted him. i'll switch to normal Now this report may be incorrect - I didn't think portage ever changed the profile automatically. However, this would explain the unusually high number of users who have been using the developer sub profile recently. While I have a theory on how to reproduce it (basically set up a chroot using an old snapshot, select a 2007/2008 profile that's about to be deleted, then sync the tree and see what happens), I don't know if this will reproduce it for sure. Maybe someone else knows better how this change might be caused to take place. Personally I don't think portage should ever switch profiles automatically - tell the user the currently selected profile is no longer valid and tell them where to find information on how to fix it. Even if it were to change it automatically, there's no way it should be changing users to the developer subprofile (unless they're already on it, but I would've expected the users to be reporting these issues sooner were that the case).
The profile is never changed by portage. Maybe an ebuild called `eselect profile` or something.
Need a reproducable case for this :)