Why should there be a freeze, rather than a branch. Mozilla did it, *BSD's do it. Branch, take time to make stable, but also continue adding packages. We all know how long the woody freeze was for debian (not that i think that would happen here)..........
we freeze as so the packaging (you know, ISO, tarballs, that sort of thing) can get a stable (that means -unchanging) set of builds to make binaries from. with a freeze we can lock things down and count on them not to change for at least the days it takes to make all stage tarballs, ISO images and others, this means that the packages used for all, the package trees and other information essential to ensure that all the binary versions are equal remain equal.
the question is not 'why do we freeze', the question is 'why dont we branch' we could have a stable tree that we freeze with while using another branch to develop off of ...
Actually, i remember a while back drobbins mentioning in an interview the possibility of a stable server branch, so branching has definately been thrown around...
Too much work currently with the amount of active developers :(
Gentoo now has an unstable branch: use ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~arch" where arch=x86,ppc,.... See the www.gentoo.org documentation for more information.
Thank you for using Gentoo.
*** Bug 16990 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
