Many changes have been made to this version, with the most notable being significant improvements to the LiveCDs. Due to the Release Candidate nature of 1.4_rc3, full sets of the Gentoo Reference Platform packages have not been produced, but they will be included in 1.4_final. I'm not privy to the technical details and perhaps you may have legitimate reasons for withholding the GRP packages from the latest release. But this is really beginning to bog down users like me. I've spent three weeks trying to get a basic version of openoffice to work and two weeks trying to get kde to work. And they still don't work, despite my following the suggestions in the forums and reading the bug reports. One of the difficulties is that these are big packages that take a long time to download and compile. With openoffice I usually have to wait about 2 or 3 hours just to see if it fails at the same place. In any other context, this would seem unacceptable. I've gotten these things to work on previous installs (I've installed about 4 or 5 times), often after doing workarounds. When I used the GRP packages on the 1.4rc2, things compiled and installed beatifully. And quickly. Gentoo users are to a certain extent tolerant of the evolving nature of the portage /update system, but having a workable window manager and office program is a minimum. But I'd like to spend my time working on databases and content management systems rather than trying to get KDE to compile correctly. This stuff is not fun. So unless there are numerous show-stopper bugs, I'd like to propose that GRP packages for xfree, kde and openoffice be on every release candidate CD. Given the uncertain schedule of major releases, it seems unrealistic to not give users the chance to install major packages this way. GRP solves a major reason why users would abandon gentoo.
We simply don't have the time to build up GRP packages at the moment for rcs. We will do so when we are able.
well, we are no longer doing release candidates and will be using minor point releases instead (ie. 1.4.1,) and I will be building up GRP sets as part of QA. So this will get done.
I apologise for this bugspam, but I wish to close this product, so I need to move all the bugs.
